The Measure of All Things

by Ken Alder

  “Today, as in the distant”: Min. Aff. Etr. to French diplomatic agents, 16 November 1869, in Bigourdan, Système métrique, 272–73. Min. Commerce, “Rapport à S. M. l’Empereur,” 1 September 1869, in Bigourdan, Système métrique, 265–72.

  “no serious scientist”: Adolph Hirsch, in Commission Internationale du Mètre, Session de 1870, Procès-verbaux des séances (Paris: Baudry, 1871), 29. For the run-up to the meeting, see Morin, “Notice historique sur le système métrique,” Annales du Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers 9 (1871): 573–640.

  In 1872: For the meeting of 1872, see Commission Internationale du Mètre, Procès-verbaux des séances du Comité des Recherches Préparatoires, April 1872 (Paris: Viéville, 1872). Commission Internationale du Mètre, “Procès-verbaux,” September–October 1872, in Annales du Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers 10 (1872): 3–229.

  The “Convention of the Meter”: For the convention of 1875, see Charles-Edmond Guillaume, La création du Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1927); U.S. Department of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards, The International Bureau of Weights and Measures, 1875–1975, NBS Special Bulletin 420 (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1975). For internal French debates, see AN F17 3715, Bureau des Longitudes, “Rapport sur la proposition relative à l’adoption d’une annexe géodésique,” 15 October 1875. The British and Dutch were also against the creation of a permanent international bureau.

  It would take fifteen years: For the making of the new meters, see Bigourdan, Système métrique, 338–52.

  Thus Jawaharlal Nehru: For India, see Lal C. Verman and Jainath Kaul, eds., Metric Change in India (New Delhi: Indian Standards Institution, 1970).

  Britain was the first: For measurement in nineteenth-century Britain, see Simon Schaffer, “Metrology, Metrication, and Victorian Values,” Victorian Science in Context, Bernard Lightman, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 438–74. Even after the 1834 fire at the Houses of Parliament incinerated the standard “Exchequer yard” the British affirmed their commitment to a physical standard, rather than a natural standard subject to continual modification. See A. D. C. Simpson, “The Pendulum as the British Length Standard: A Nineteenth-Century Legal Aberration,” in Making Instruments Count: Essays on Historical Scientific Instruments, R. G. W. Anderson, J. A. Bennett, and W. F. Ryan, eds. (Cambridge, England: Variorum, 1993), 174–90.

  “disingenuous concealment”: James Yates, What Is the Best Unit of Length? (London: Bell and Daldy, 1858), 20, 24–46. See also John F. W. Herschel, “The Yard, the Pendulum, and the Metre,” [1863], Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects (New York: Routledge, 1869), 419–51; John F. W. Herschel, “The Battle of the Standards,” The Times (21 June 1864): 7; (4 July 1864): 11; (2 May 1864): 12; also Airy, “Figure of the Earth,” 5:165–240. The Times was anti-metric, though it denied being anti-French; see Ewart, The Times (16 June 1864): 11.

  “A party of astronomers”: William John Macquorn Rankine, “The Three-Foot Rule,” Songs and Fables (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1874).

  “sheepish”: Editorial in Toronto Star, quoted in Grace Ellen Watkins, “Metrication in the United States: A Social Constructivist Approach” (Ph.D. diss., Southern Illinois University, 1998), 305. See also Minister of Trade and Commerce, Government of Canada, White Paper on Metric Conversion in Canada, January 1970; Gerald Black, Canada Goes Metric (Toronto: Doubleday, 1974).

  America is the only: For American diversity, see J. Q. Adams, “Weights and Measures,” 741–43. In the 1820s the number of troy grains in an avoirdupois pound still differed by as much as 5 percent in customs houses up and down the Atlantic coast, and the capacity of a bushel basket by as much as 20 percent. Louisiana had a different colonial experience and so different measures.

  America, in Jefferson’s terms: The best history of the metric system in America is Charles F. Treat, A History of the Metric System Controversy in the United States, National Bureau of Standards, Pub. 345-10 (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1971). See also Edward Franklin Cox, “A History of the Metric System of Weights and Measures, with Emphasis on Campaigns for Its Adoption in Great Britain and the United States Prior to 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1956). For the arrival of the 1799 iron meter in the U.S., see APS, Hassler, “Confrontation des toises faite par le Comité des poids et mesures à Paris,” November 1806. For the sale of the measures, see APS, Hassler, “Livres concernant les mesures de degrés,” [1808]. Hassler also visited Lalande and Delambre in Paris in the 1790s to collect metrical standards and geodetic instruments, including a Borda repeating circle; see Hassler, Memoirs, Emil Zschokke, trans. (Nice, France: Gauthier, [1877], 1882), 36–38, 53–57; Florian Cajori, The Chequered Career of Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler (Boston: Christopher, 1929), 20–23, 35–36. For Hassler’s report, see “Weights and Measures,” 29 June 1832, 22nd Congress, 1st Session, Register of Debates (Washington, DC: Duff Green, 1832), 1–123. For general information on weights and measures at this time, see North American Review 97 (October 1837): 269–92; National Academy of Sciences, A History of the First Half-Century of the National Academy of Sciences, 1863–1913 (Washington, DC: n.p., 1913), 206–13.

  “Never,” he wrote: Josh Billings, in Aubrey Drury, World Metric Standardization: An Urgent Issue (San Francisco: World Metric Standardization Council, 1922), 157.

  “measured in good”: Charles Latimer, Proceedings of the Ohio Auxiliary Society of the International Institute, January 1887, in Treat, History of the Metric System, 89. Charles Latimer, The French Metric System, or, The Battle of the Standards (Chicago: Wilson, 1880), 28–29. Edward F. Cox, “The International Institute: First Organized Opposition to the Metric System,” Ohio Historical Quarterly 68 (1959): 54–83.

  “is miles ahead”: President Ford quoted in Susan Fraker Holt, revised by Gretchen Borges, The United States and the Metric System (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, December 1976), 36, emphasis added. Daniel V. De Simone, ed., A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come, National Bureau of Standards, Pub. 345 (Washington, DC: USGPO, July 1971).

  “WAM’s guidelines”: Bob Greene, “Man from WAM! Puts His Foot Down,” Chicago Tribune (11 April 1978), 2:1.

  A 1992 follow-up: For the U.S. in the 1990s, see Gary P. Carver, A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come—for Real (Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology, June 1992); George Gallup, Jr., The Gallup Poll (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1991), 210.

  The most spectacular: Arthur G. Stephenson et al., “Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board: Phase I Report,” NASA, 10 November 1999; Science 286 (1999): 18, 207; The New York Times (21, 24 September, 1 October 1999).

  EPILOGUE: THE SHAPE OF OUR WORLD

  “You’re such a fool!”: Jean-Paul Sartre, La nausée (Paris: Gallimard, [1938]), 179–80.

  The baseline of Melun: On the Melun baseline in the nineteenth century, see ADSM MDZ333, Bassot et al., “Vérification faite en 1882 des travaux géodesiques des astronomes Delambre, Laplace et de Prony,” 12 August 1882. For the traffic accident, see Levallois, Mesurer la terre, 134.

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