A history of measurement might not sound like an interesting premise for a book. It’s actually … kind of amazing. That’s in large part because the author, James Vincent, has done an excellent job with the book. In Beyond Measure, Vincent goes to the deeper questions, the reasons why measurement matters. He uses the conceptual framework to touch on how we understand the world, how people and governments exert systems of control on others around them, and how changing measurement systems can reflect internal or international conflict between countries. I loved it, and I’d say it’s well worth a read.
Quotes
Introduction: Why measurement matters
Page 8
The roots of measurement are entangled with those of civilisation, traceable back to the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. It was these societies that first learned to apply consistent units in construction, trade, and astronomy, building towering monuments to gods and kings, and mapping the stars with their newfound power.
Page 9
Regardless of whether we think about it or not, measurement is suffused throughout the world; an ordering principle that affects not only what we see and touch, but also the often intangible guidelines of society, from clocks and calendars to the rewards and punishments of work.
Page 12
It’s not enough to simply compare one tower to another or use a measuring tool the same height as the target. We must instead create an intermediary: a unit of measure that represents nothing but its own value and provides a convenient medium for transferring information from one domain to another.
Page 14
metrological triumphalism: a confidence in the power of number to square the untidy mysteries of the universe and tame the unknown through calculation. It is a reasonable belief given the history of the sciences, where accurate measure has time and time again proved itself a prerequisite for experiment and a spur to discovery.
Page 17
Indeed, if you were to summarise the history of measurement in a single sentence, it would be as a history of increasing abstraction. Measurement begins life rooted in the particulars of human experience but over time has become increasingly detached from our life and labour. Just as with Kepler’s laws, the result is that it has attained authority over an ever- expanding domain.
Page 20
Corruption, too, flourished with variable measures. Manorial lords, for example, would collect their feudal dues using capacity measures of grain larger than those used in markets and mills. When their dependents were cheated, what authority could they turn to? An absence of standardised measures created a power vacuum that was easy to exploit.
Page 24
Measurement is unquestionably a tool of control and, as a result, has been used throughout history to manipulate, persecute, and oppress. To measure something, after all, is to impose limits on the world: to say this far but no further.
Page 24
Measurement is a tool that reinforces what we find important in life, what we think is worth paying attention to. The question, then, of who gets to make those choices is of the utmost importance.
1: The kindling of civilisation: The ancient world, the first units of measurement, and their cognitive rewards
Page 32
‘Even then people were reliant on the Nile, and one of the reasons we think the whole ancient Egyptian state came about, with the creation of writing and bureaucracy and so on, was to organise access to the water and land,’ she says. ‘You have to figure out a way of documenting who owns the water and who gets access to it, and that requires the state.’
Page 41
a product of the state’s bureaucratic culture known as the Onomasticon of Amenopĕ. In its simplest form, the onomasticon is simply a list of some 610 entries: items that collectively span the known world.
Page 46
For the ancient Greeks, these stars were the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas running from the hunter Orion while their father was occupied holding up the heavens. But they were also a signal to labourers: when the stars disappeared, it meant that the sailing season had ended and they must return to their fields. As the eighth- century bc poet Hesiod writes in his didactic poem Works and Days: ‘When the Pleiades, the Hyades, and mighty Orion set, / remember the time has come to plow again– / and may the earth nurse for you a full year’s supply.’
Page 51
The science writer Robert P. Crease suggests that there are three crucial properties that units of measurement must possess: accessibility, proportionality, and consistency.
Page 52
Poppy, millet, and wheat seeds have all been used to create measures of length and weight, some of which are still in use today. The barleycorn, for example, has a long history in Great Britain as a unit of length. It’s equal to a third of an inch, or around 0.8 centimetres, and has been associated with length at least since the early fourteenth century, when King Edward II declared that ‘three grains of barley, dry and round make an inch’. This definition later became standardised in the imperial system of measurement, and is still in use today as an increment in UK and US shoe sizes. The difference between sizes is equivalent to a third of an inch, which shoemakers call a barleycorn.
Page 53
we still measure precious gems like diamonds and emeralds with the carat, 37 a unit derived from the seed of the Middle Eastern carob tree (and that is now standardised as 200 milligrams).
Page 55
it was Ethiopian folk wisdom to ask a friend with ‘long arms’ to go to the market on your behalf, the better to extract favourable measures.
Page 56
Each year, during the inundation of the Nile, the floodwaters would destroy the boundaries of the river’s surrounding farmland, and it was the job of a specialist corps of surveyors, known as harpedonaptae, or ‘rope- stretchers’, to restore order to the land. Using knotted ropes pulled tight to avoid sagging, they would venture into the mud and redraw the boundaries of the fields, ensuring that the waters unleashed by the river could be put to productive use. Their work was one of coordination and communication: minimising disputes between farmers and ensuring that the productive land was not wasted.
2: Measure and the social order: The importance of metrology for early states and the fabric of society
Page 68
It’s often assumed that the state is needed to create this shared space, but historical evidence of the development of measurement suggests otherwise. Take, for example, the ancient use of mass standards: stones carved into regular shapes like spools, cubes, and ovals that were placed in balance pans to weigh goods. These can be found buried deep in the archaeological record, appearing from around 3000 bc onwards. This is centuries before the first descriptions of ‘royal’ standards appear, suggesting rulers co- opted as much as they created consistent standards of measure. Despite the lack of any central regulation, these ancient mass standards are incredibly consistent in their values. One analysis of more than 2,000 standards used across Mesopotamia, the Aegean, Anatolia, and Europe found that the weight of these stones differed very little between 3000 and 1000 bc. The total variation among the standards, which were recovered from locations thousands of kilometres distant, is between just 9 and 13 per cent. The conclusion is that Bronze Age merchants were capable of regulating units of measurement without the need for an overarching authority, with each individual meeting between traders serving as an opportunity to compare and adjust their weights.
Page 69
the regulation of units of measure has been embraced by various political systems over the millennia. And from the ancient world through to the early modern nation state, enforcing these reliable units has been both a privilege and a duty, as necessary in justifying a leader’s rule as the punishment of criminals or maintenance of roads.
Page 71
The link between measurement and music can be traced back to stories of the mythical Yellow Emperor, Huangdi, who was said to have created the first musical pitch pipes when he commanded his music master to cut bamboo stalks to specific lengths, matching the cries of male and female phoenixes. 10 These pitch pipes, known as lülü, defined the harmonic parameters of traditional Chinese music, and were used to tune the instruments of the imperial court. As a result, their exact value was not simply a matter of aesthetic importance but held ‘cosmic significance’, connecting the rule of the emperors to a semi- divine past. 11 Because the pitches of the lülü were determined by their length, the value of the units used to measure the pipes could become a battleground for political factions. This dynamic is seen most clearly in the life of Xun Xu, a senior court official in the third century ad. Xun Xu was tasked with reorganising the imperial state led by the newly inaugurated Jin dynasty, 12 which controlled the south- eastern portion of present- day China. He sought to legitimise the rule of his new master, Emperor Wu, through the oblique politics of the imperial court, and by enacting a number of reforms to strengthen the emperor’s authority. These included changing the basic unit of linear measure, the chi. To define the new unit, Xun Xu raided tombs from the ancient Zhou dynasty, a long- lasting lineage that introduced many of China’s enduring political and cultural traditions. He dug up old Zhou jade rulers and used these as a template for his new Jin measure, which in turn altered the pitch of the lülü. He argued that by doing so, Emperor Wu was restoring the wisdom of this earlier, hallowed age, and that Wu’s predecessors had been literally out of tune with the harmony of the ancients. The Jin reforms– both metrological and musicological– would restore this glorious past. For Xun Xu, though, this meddling with measures did not have a happy end, and when he debuted his newly tuned instruments at court, the reception was not wholly harmonious. When the band started playing, the respected scholar and musician Ruan Xian, who was part of a group aligned with the pre- Jin regime, complained that the resulting harmonies were too high in pitch. ‘A high pitch connotes grief,’ Ruan is said to have commented. ‘These are not the pitches of a flourishing state, but the pitches of a dying one. The music of a dying state is sad and full of longing, and its people are full of misery.’ 13 His musical augury proved reliable. Not many years later, Emperor Wu died and the Jin state was plunged into disorder as eight rival princes struggled for power. Finding harmony among so many competing standards would be too much even for Xun Xu’s cleverness.
Page 75
In general, these variable units stayed in use at least into the nineteenth century, and their appeal is easy to understand. They’re rich in information that modern measures just don’t capture, shrinking and expanding to suit the particularities of their environment, like the quality of the soil or evenness of the terrain. Understanding how much land could be ploughed in a day or how much seed was needed to sow the next harvest was essential knowledge in an agricultural economy, and the rise and fall of these measures follows the contours of economic and industrial development.
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Each moment of metrological imprecision offers the powerful and unscrupulous an opportunity for profit.
Page 78
The most common infraction seems to be nobles and merchants insisting on using their own set of capacity measures when taking payment, which presumably offered unfavourable portions compared to those used among the peasants. One of the most well- documented records of this sort of manipulation can be found in the Cahiers de doléances, an eighteenth- century survey of complaints and grievances collected in the run- up to the French Revolution.
Page 79
with sunset and sunrise changing throughout the year, this meant the hour had to move with the seasons, expanding in summer and contracting in winter. These so- called temporal hours were inherited by Europeans in the Middle Ages and meant that the length of the hour in London, for example, could vary from 38 to 82 minutes.
Page 79
This fact was not so much unnoticed in this period as much as it was an observation that would simply have made no sense. Thinking of the hour as a consistent measure was not a familiar concept for most people, while the minute and second didn’t exist as common units. (The division of the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds comes from the Babylonians, who used a base- 60, or sexagecimal, system of counting for their astronomy. The ancient Greeks later adopted this and divided circular astronomical maps into 360 divisions, which were later transposed on to clock faces.)
Page 81
This unusual coexistence of temporal hours and mechanical horology is memorialised by some of the most beautiful clocks in existence: circular timepieces with hour markers positioned on rails that move about their perimeter like tiny train carriages, sliding back and forth to adjust the length of each hour so that it matches the changes of the seasons.
Page 83
Psychostasia is thought to have made its way into Christianity via the Coptic sects of north- eastern Africa, who themselves likely inherited it from the Egyptians. The weighing of souls is never directly mentioned in the Bible, but Christian iconography has embraced the scales of judgement, usually assigning them to the archangel Michael, leader of God’s armies.
Page 90
In Italy, from the twelfth century onwards such public standards seem to have become popular again as the area grew in wealth. Lugli dubs these monuments pietre di paragone, or ‘touchstones’, as they were often carved into stone on the sides of important buildings and public infrastructure. This gives them a status similar to other important rights and duties in medieval communes, which were often recorded in the same way. The facade of the cathedral in Lucca, for example, tells traders to ‘commit no theft nor trick nor falsification within the courtyard’, 53 while the commune of Perugia announced a new form of taxation in 1234 by carving it into a slab of stone and affixing this to their cathedral’s belfry.
Page 90
The pietre di paragone got the same treatment, with units of length carved as stone incisions into the walls of churches and markets.
Page 91
Verifying the value of a standard this way is referred to by modern metrologists as ‘traceability’, and it underscores the notion that if units of measure are to be trusted, then there needs to be a way to trace them back to their source and ensure they have not been altered. While length standards were the most common example of pietre di paragone, other units also appeared carved in stone. A set of standards on Padua’s Palazzo della Ragione from 1277 include a standard- sized brick, roof tile, and loaf of bread.
3: The proper subject of measurement: How the scientific revolution expanded measure’s domain
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When Plato says that the ideal population for a state is 5,040 citizens, for example, he doesn’t justify this choice by calculations involving, say, food supplies or division of labour. Having 5,040 citizens is right and proper for a city because 5,040 is the product of 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 and therefore a mystically significant figure.
Page 109
They approached scholarship like indiscriminate magpies, compiling anything that caught their eye in disparate sources, and happy to treat rumour as reliable fact.
Page 118
A similar transformation took place in the world of medieval music, powered by another quantifying tool: musical notation. For most of the medieval era, music could only be passed on from singer to singer, with our favourite encyclopedist Isidore lamenting in the seventh century that ‘unless sounds are held by the memory of man, they perish, because they cannot be written down’.
Page 119
Pope John XXII, actually banned ars nova in the first papal bull to deal only with music, the 1324 Docta sanctorum patrum. Seven centuries later, the decree’s complaint is quite cogent. It says that an obsession with melodic and rhythmic innovation has obscured the devotional content of plainsong: ‘The voices move incessantly to and fro, intoxicating rather than soothing the ear, while the singers themselves try to convey the emotion of the music by their gestures.’ The bull even refers specifically to the tools of musical measurement as responsible for this unwanted change, explaining that ‘the measured dividing of the tempora [periods, the basic unit of duration in music]’ has allowed notes of ‘small value’ to proliferate, which choke and starve the ‘modest rise and temperate descents of plainsong’ like weeds in a well- ordered garden. 43 The skills of measurement, quantification, and division were proving too fertile.
Page 120
Perhaps most importantly, the mechanical clock propelled a new conception of time into the public consciousness, transforming it from a constant flow, embodied in steady emissions of water, sand, and mercury, to a quantified count; something divisible, discrete, and measurable.
Page 123
As with the monastery bells, public clocks organised citizens into a cohesive unit, turning what had previously been private lives into communal tides that rose, worked, and retired as one. The fluctuations of the sun might determine the labour of agricultural peasants, but the new class of urban workers had previously lacked such central oversight and authority. This vacuum was filled.
Page 123
The mechanical philosophers reasoned that if clockwork was able to capture the movement of the stars and bring elaborate automata to life, who was to say that the natural world didn’t operate under similar logic? Might not the universe itself be only a sort of monstrously complex clock, a machina mundi, or ‘world machine’, that animated matter through the operation of as yet undiscovered gears and levers? If this was the case, then Aristotle’s teleological explanations, in which rocks fell to Earth and smoke rose to the heavens because it was in their nature to do so, were crude and unsatisfying. If nature worked like a machine, then it must rely on observable cause and effect, not some inscrutable soul- like purpose. You didn’t need to grapple with the world of the forms to unravel its workings; you needed experimentation and observation.
Page 126
From 1609, Galileo’s work moved to a new plane itself. Using home- made telescopes he’d constructed solely by reading descriptions of the device, he began to examine the night sky. There he found many unexpected sights, including the moons of Jupiter, the first objects seen orbiting other planets, and the surface of the moon (which, despite the claims of ancient authority, was not perfectly smooth but ‘everywhere full of enormous swellings, deep chasms and sinuosities’ 54). Turning to the sun, he noted patterns of darkness moving from west to east across its face. Were these clouds? Other planets? Whatever they were, they showed the heavens weren’t immutable, as Aristotle had claimed. The world above changed day by day, just like the world below. The mistake had been trusting tradition and authority instead of the testimony of the senses. As Galileo wrote, following his discovery of what we now know to be sunspots: ‘So long as men were in fact obliged to call the Sun most pure and most lucid, no shadows or impurities whatever had been perceived in it; but now it shows itself to us as partly impure and spotty, why should we not call it spotted and not pure? For names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.’
Page 129
This is a core dynamic in the history of measurement, in which greater abstraction allows our tools to encompass larger territories. Abstraction loosens ties to the local and particular, allowing freedom of movement. But it comes with a price. As we saw at the beginning of the chapter with Donne’s concern that this ‘new philosophy puts all in doubt’, there is a psychological cost associated with the breaks of the scientific revolution, one that is powered by abstraction and measurement. The sureties of faith and the consolations of the ancients were weakened. New knowledge about humanity’s literal and metaphysical place in the universe had to be assimilated.
Page 130
He was a rigorous and inventive experimentalist; someone who stared at the sun and poked blunt needles into his eye to investigate the nature of light. But he was also an ardent alchemist and numerologist who extended the logic of his theories far beyond what his experimental proofs could support (or so his critics maintained). And while his laws of gravitation and motion mechanised the universe, turning the music of the spheres into a cosmic game of billiards, he also stressed the importance of unseen forces in nature. He considered phenomena like magnetism and electricity beyond the scope of his philosophy, and placed immaterial principles at the heart of the Principia in the form of the gravitational constant, G, which somehow held the universe together. What exactly this force was Newton could neither quantify nor explain, but he knew it was necessary for his calculations to work.
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As the English economist and Newton scholar John Maynard Keynes put it: ‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.’
4: The quantifying spirit: The disenchantment of the world and the history of hot and cold
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It was here, on cold and crisp autumn mornings like today, that the bodies of executed criminals would be cut open for the benefit of young medical students. In return for their posthumous contributions to science, the dead earned themselves the redemption of a Christian burial, while students, watching from vertiginous tiers of wooden benches, learned how to save the living.
Page 139
In his utopian fable New Atlantis, Bacon sketched out a blueprint for his ideal state: an island empire ruled by pious monarchs, whose power is sustained by what Bacon calls ‘Solomon’s House’, a state- run scientific organisation that is equal parts secret society and research university. The institute’s credo encapsulates the grand ambitions of these early empiricists: ‘The end of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.’
Page 141
The creation of reliable thermometers, he says, perfectly demonstrates the difficulty of establishing scientific truths in unknown territory. In the case of temperature, the problems are simple to articulate but maddeningly difficult to answer. How do you test the reliability of a thermometer without already possessing a reliable thermometer as a benchmark?
Page 143
For the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, fire was not merely a material phenomenon but the first principle of the universe. It was the source of all life and a constant roiling change that burned through the world, transforming matter. The order of things ‘no god nor man did create’, taught Heraclitus, only ‘ever- living fire’, which shapes life in the womb and burns dead wood to make space for new growth. ‘All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods,’ he said.
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We don’t need to see a body on a dissecting table to know that heat is life and cold is death.
Page 147
These experiments show how quantification can transform a concept like temperature. With the help of these early thermoscopes, hot and cold are no longer qualities that inhere within objects, hidden and inscrutable, but information that can be extracted from its source. Transformed into abstract data, this information can be collected, shared, compared. And the new testimony of these instruments is so powerful that it can overrule even our senses.
Page 147
And writing at around the same time in 1620, Francis Bacon comments that the thermoscope’s sense of ‘heat and cold is so delicate and exquisite, that it far exceeds the human touch’. 16 The scientific instrument had begun to displace human experience as the arbiter of reality.
Page 148
Although the exact mechanisms of heat and cold were not fully understood in the early modern period, scientists knew that changing temperature had an effect on a range of phenomena, from subtle processes like the speed of chemical reactions to more obvious events like melting, evaporation, and condensation. This meant that being able to record and subsequently adjust temperature was essential for experimentation in a range of disciplines.
Page 149
In the same way that the consistency of millet seeds provided a baseline for creating ancient measures of weight and length, allowing anyone to recreate the same unit as long as they could find enough seeds, scientists needed fixed points to anchor their scales.
Page 151
One contributor who stands out is Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, an instrument- maker whose work brought him fame in the early eighteenth century, but whose early life was marked by tragedy.
Page 152
After four years in Amsterdam, he absconded from his apprenticeship and became a scientific fugitive, stealing money from his employers to fund his own research, while hopping around European cities to learn from the great scientists of the age. His guardians responded as any caring adults would: they had a warrant issued for his arrest and gave the authorities permission to deport him to the East Indies if captured.
Page 155
Although measurement is stereotyped as a stultifying activity that reduces the vibrancy of the world to mere numbers, work like de Luc’s shows the opposite can be just as true. The desire to measure something with accuracy forces people to seek new corners of the phenomenological world; to find nooks and crannies of physical experience that were previously lost in the melee. The closer we look, the more the world reveals itself.
Page 155
There was just too much variety in the temperatures at which boiling occurred. Instead, scientists turned to measuring the steam produced by the water, which proved to be a much more stable reference point. Whether the water below was sifflement or soubresaut, the steam above was consistent. This may seem like a failure, as if the scientists working on the problem had wasted time with a series of wrong answers before stumbling upon the ‘right’ solution. But it demonstrates an important concept within metrology and science, what Chang calls ‘epistemic iteration’. This is the process by which ‘successive stages of knowledge, each building on the preceding one, are created in order to enhance the achievement of certain epistemic goals’.
Page 159
Thomson was inspired in his work by a text named Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu (‘ Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire’), which was published many decades earlier in 1824 by French scientist and military engineer Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot. It was the only book Carnot ever published, and was ignored almost completely by his peers, but it contained enough original thinking for a lifetime’s work. ‘It was utterly without precedent and dense with implications,’ as one historian puts it. 35
Page 163
This claim, that measurement diminishes its subject, is one that appears frequently in discussions of metrology. It is part of a broader charge laid against the sciences and captured best in Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment: the displacement of the supernatural by the scientific and an accompanying loss of meaning. Think, for example, of how caloric– a substance of almost folkloric properties: weightless, frictionless, and invisible– is supplanted by the brute mechanics of the steam engine and the dynamic theory of heat. In this framework of knowledge, the mysteries of the universe are eliminated as chemistry replaces alchemy and enchantment is subdued by engineering. Or so the story goes.
Page 163
I don’t agree that our changing understanding of temperature has led to an impoverishment of meaning. Instead, just as the heat of the furnace turns coal into steam and the motion of turbines, the scientific refinements of thermometry have transformed the richness of their subject, revitalising old mythologies and offering new ways to understand the world. Consider, for example, how the instrumentation of thermometry has furnished our language with new explanatory ideas. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the thermometer and its cousin the barometer were eagerly adopted as metaphors, appearing in books, newspaper articles, and political speeches. The visual language of falling and rising liquid was intuitively understood, while the uncanny sensitivity of these devices to invisible phenomena suggested they might have other, mysterious powers of quantification.
5: The metric revolution: The radical politics of the metric system and its origin in the French Revolution
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the system should be decimal, with all units divisible by 10. This was, and is still today, a controversial demand, with opponents arguing that base- 12 and base- 16 systems (like those used by British imperial and US customary measures) are easier for calculation. They allowed users to divide units into halves, thirds, and quarters without resorting to decimal places, simplifying daily transactions.
Page 186
The expedition itself took seven years, during which Delambre and Méchain struggled not only with the demands of precision, but also with the fevered climate of the French Revolution. Their method of survey was triangulation, which uses geometry to calculate distance. Their approach was based on the Euclidean principle that if you know the three angles of a triangle and the length of one side, you can calculate the length of the other two.
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this unfamiliar activity meant they were often challenged by locals, who took them for spies, or worse, counter- revolutionaries.
6: A grid laid across the world: The surveying of land, the colonisation of the US, and the power of abstraction
Page 215
Land surveys can seem like mere bureaucratic conveniences, but they play an important role in the development of the modern state. In his influential 1998 book Seeing Like a State, the political scientist James C. Scott argues that over the last few centuries, states have deployed various ‘tools of legibility’ to better understand and control the activities of their citizens. These tools are varied in both form and application, but share certain traits: they standardise and simplify the world, reshaping the organic development of society into forms that are more easily aggregated by administrative centres. Censuses are used to discover the size and composition of a populace, for example, and land surveys and property records document where they live and what they own. These methods of standardisation can touch on the most personal matters, reaching into the habits and customs of everyday life to adjust them for the benefit of unseen bureaucrats. Minority and regional languages are discriminated against or suppressed in favour of official languages, ensuring their speakers’ assimilation into the dominant culture. And weights and measures of individual regions are replaced with standardised units that allow commerce to be similarly harmonised and surveilled.
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Take, for example, the introduction of surnames in Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages. Until at least the fourteenth century, writes Scott, the majority of Europeans did not have permanent patronymics, with individuals often adopting new names when starting a new job or moving to a new area. 3 This caused problems for the state when trying to track the activities of individuals, as illustrated by a court case from sixteenth- century England. Here, a Welshman is summoned to appear in court, but when asked for his name replies that he is ‘Thomas Ap [son of] William, Ap Thomas, Ap Richard, Ap Hoel, Ap Evan Vaughan’. It’s a perfectly normal name for the period, a genealogical title that is both intimate and informative, identifying not only the individual, but his ancestry. The information it contains makes sense to members of Thomas’s community, who likely knew his father and grandfather before him. But to outsiders it is cryptic. The judge is unhappy and scolds Thomas, telling him to ‘leave the old manner’ and adopt a single surname that suits the administrative needs of the state. Whereupon Thomas Ap William Ap Thomas (etc.) ‘called himself Moston, according to the name of his principal house, and left that name to his posteritie’. 4
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The courtroom christening of Thomas Moston underscores the driving purpose of tools of legibility: to iron out the particularities of local knowledge and repackage it into universal forms. Once you’re aware of this dynamic, you will find it everywhere in your life, when the bureaucracies of state and business slot you into categories built for their convenience.
Page 220
It’s interesting to contrast this method with older traditions of survey and ownership in the British Isles, such as the annual ritual of ‘beating the bounds’. During the beating of the bounds, residents of a town or village would gather together to carry out a foot survey of their community. Priests and elders would lead the expeditions, pointing out geographical features like streams, rocks, and walls that marked the limits of their parish.
Page 224
This flexibility made Gunter’s chain the dominant tool for land surveying in the English- speaking world for some 300 years. And although it has long been superseded by modern measuring tools, Gunter’s chain is still embedded in the landscapes of former British colonies, including the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Roads in these territories are often one chain wide, while building lots and city blocks are commonly measured in multiples of chains. In the UK itself, the length of the chain is encoded in one of the country’s cultural cornerstones: the cricket pitch. It’s proof that if you look hard enough at the divisions of the world that seem arbitrary or haphazard, you will find long- forgotten choices, produced by necessity and preserved by tradition.
Page 227
Jefferson was critical in setting the manner of this expansion, and helped form a trio of laws passed in 1784, 1785, and 1787 and collectively known as the Northwest Ordinances. Along with the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution, these are among the most important documents in the founding of the United States– not because they contain impassioned cries for democracy, but because they describe, simply and plainly, how its land would be divided, sold, and governed. The Northwest Ordinances authorised a survey in the form of a huge grid, initially covering the great mass of territory that lay between the founding states and the Mississippi River. The main subdivision of the grid was the ‘township’– a 6- mile by 6- mile square (the decimally minded Jefferson had argued for 10 by 10) that contained thirty- six subdivisions of a square mile each.
Page 228
As the French political scientist Émile Boutmy commented in 1891, when the surveyors had crossed the whole of the continent and the true scope of this land rush could be better appreciated: ‘The striking and peculiar characteristic of American society is that it is not so much a democracy as a huge commercial company for the discovery, cultivation, and capitalization of its enormous territory. The United States are primarily a commercial society, and only secondarily a nation.’
Page 231
The surveyor’s chain may not have been as directly responsible for the death and misery of indigenous people as the Winchester repeating rifle and smallpox virus were, but it was still an essential tool of colonial violence.
Page 232
Often, agreements between Native Americans and colonists were broken by settlers squatting the land illegally. Such activity could be officially disavowed by the government while serving its purposes. It created a foothold for further settlement and provoked Indian violence that could be met with military force. Surveying in this context gave the appearance of agreement between different groups, only for colonisers to later trespass the same boundaries.
Page 234
Contrary to Jefferson’s propaganda, his grid supported not just a prosperous yeoman citizenry, but also an enslaved and immiserated society: men, women, and children in chains, who mixed their blood and sweat with the soil, as Locke had envisioned, without expectation of ever claiming ownership.
Page 236
The template for survey- led conquest can probably be traced back to the British and the seventeenth- century war in Ireland led by Oliver Cromwell. Determined to quell a growing coalition of Royalists and Catholics, Cromwell pursued a campaign of pillage and slaughter in the country, leaving more than a fifth of the population dead and confiscating land from Irish nobles and clergy. To facilitate this process, a survey of the island was commissioned by William Petty, an army physician and former professor of anatomy at the University of Oxford. Petty recruited hundreds of soldiers to act as surveyors, teaching them to measure the terrain using Gunter’s chain. The resulting Down Survey (reportedly so called because ‘a chain was laid down’ 47) covered nearly 8,400,000 acres48 of territory and is a milestone in cartography: the most detailed, accurate, and extensive cadastral survey of the early modern era, and the first conducted at a national scale. For those who commissioned it, the survey was a huge success, facilitating the transfer of land and control of the nation. After it was completed, Catholic land ownership in Ireland fell from around 60 per cent to 14 per cent, 49 resulting in ‘the most epic and monumental transformation of Irish life, property and landscape that the island has ever known’. 50 It was a forceable change in the country’s ruling elite that wouldn’t be reversed for centuries, and, again, it was the power of the survey and measurement that was instrumental.
7: Measuring life and death: The invention of statistics and the birth of average
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this is one of the fundamental traps of measurement: the more precise you are, the more inconsistent your results often appear to be.
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His work triggered a statistical feeding frenzy among the professional classes, with societies, journals, and institutions devoted to the discipline springing up across Europe. Members collected and published data of increasingly dubious relevance, with one resourceful acolyte siphoning off the contents of the toilets in a busy train station to attempt to deduce the ‘average European urine’.
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The consistency of these findings revealed to Quetelet that individual choice mattered far less than we had ever thought. You might believe you’re getting married out of love, but statistics show you are simply following a line on a graph. As Quetelet put it in a private letter to a friend: ‘It is society that prepares the crime; the guilty person is only the instrument who executes it.’ 29 In comparison to his earlier work, these new conclusions triggered feelings of anger and disbelief.
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He even tested the limits of his quantitative methods by applying them to matters of faith, publishing a study in 1872 titled ‘Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer’, in which he hoped to determine whether ‘those who pray attain their objects more frequently than those who do not pray’. The evidence, he concluded, suggested otherwise. The most conclusive proof he offered was that despite an abundance of weekly prayers in churches for the health of the UK’s monarchs, they remained ‘literally the shortest lived of all who have the advantage of affluence’.
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But we still struggle with the dual nature of the figures it creates; with their part- invented, part- discovered character. Statistics about education, income, and IQ are used to make sweeping judgements about whole nations and races, while many still venerate the normal curve as some arbiter of social destiny.
8: The Battle of the Standards: Metric vs imperial and metrology’s culture war
Page 293
As with the pietre di paragone carved into the marketplaces of Italian towns, or the meticulous rules about measuring grain in medieval Europe, arguments about the price of bananas aren’t abstract or academic– their significance is weighed in front of your eyes. And the grievance had remained, even though the European Union relented on the issue. In 2007, in fact, the EU had told the UK it could keep using imperial measures wherever it liked. As Günter Verheugen, EU industry commissioner, said at the time: ‘I want to bring to an end a bitter, bitter battle that has lasted for decades and which in my view is completely pointless.’
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This pervasive nature of measurements helps to explain why changes to units so often occur in times of social upheaval, such as conquest or revolution. It is only during these moments, when old sureties are tossed into the air like dice to fall who knows how, that reordering anything as fundamental as measurement can take place.
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Taylor found that if you divide twice the length of the structure’s base by its height, you get a figure that is exactly pi– an irrational number and mathematical constant not formally discovered until centuries after the pyramid’s construction. Taylor suggested that the pyramid had been built using a ‘sacred cubit’ as a base measure, tracing this theory back to Isaac Newton himself, who had claimed the same unit was used in the construction of Noah’s Ark, Solomon’s Temple, and the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept.
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It’s an approach that’s similar to the Onomasticon of Amenopĕ, putting the furthest reaches of the world into simple order, and shows the intoxicating potential of measurement: its ability to make chaos coherent and to encompass vast spans of the world.
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Mostly, he says, people don’t bat an eyelid when ARM members are working. The high- vis vests see to that. Earlier on, in a different pub, he’d shown me a video demonstrating his point. It’s called ‘Uniform Obedience’ and features an actor wearing a nondescript but official- looking outfit, standing in a city centre and asking members of the public to perform increasingly bizarre tasks. ‘Would you just walk to the left of that apple please, sir?’ he asks one passer- by, indicating a core on the pavement. ‘That’s right, to the left. Now, could you also stamp on that paving stone please? Thank you so much. Just to test the weight, you see.’ Everyone in the video does what the man says (or at least, everyone the directors decided to show), and for Tony this illustrates something fundamental about human nature, about our unthinking obedience to arbitrary rules. I don’t ask if he sees himself as an exception to this, but assume he does. Instead, I tell him that Banksy also dresses up as a council worker to get away with his own public amendments, and Tony is tickled by the comparison. ‘Does he really now? That’s fascinating, just fascinating,’ he laughs.
9: For all times, for all people: How metric units transcended physical reality and conquered the world
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This discrepancy was discovered during one of its semi- regular weigh- ins– an event that takes place every forty years or so, where national standards from around the world are flown into Paris to be compared with Le Grand K and its honour guard: a set of six témoin, or ‘witness’, kilograms that were cast at the same time as the IPK and are stored in the vault alongside it. These weigh- ins resemble the treatment of grain measures in medieval Europe, with every movement scrutinised and every variable controlled. The end effect turns protocol into ritual. The sacral objects are the standards themselves, which have to be scrupulously cleaned before being weighed. Each one is rubbed down by hand with a chamois leather soaked in a mixture of ether and ethanol and steam washed with twice- distilled water. Given the high stakes of the measurement, absolutely nothing is left to chance, with the BIPM’s official cleaning manual describing every step in meticulous detail, from the amount of pressure to be applied with the chamois (around 10 kilopascals) to the distance between kilogram and steam- cleaner (5 millimetres). Even the method of removing excess water using filter paper is carefully described: ‘For this operation, an edge of the paper is put in contact with each drop and the water allowed to flow into the paper by capillary action.’ 3 It is a secular sacrament, designed to appease the gods of metrology and maintain the reputation of international measurement, a system that supports so much in the modern world.
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Looking back on the century in 1931, the physicist Floyd K. Richtmyer noted that what the printing press had done for the medieval mind, measurement did for nineteenth- century science.
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The danger of this situation was demonstrated with dramatic emphasis in 1834, when the UK’s seat of parliament, the Old Palace of Westminster, burned down and took with it the country’s standard yard and pound. Ironically, the fire itself was caused by the disposal of another ancient tool of reckoning: tallies. These are short lengths of wood carved with notches to represent money owed. These staves are then split down their length into two pieces, foil and stock, which are given to the debtor and creditor respectively. The unique shape of the wood’s split ensures this record cannot be forged (and is also where the term ‘stockholder’ originates). The British government had been using tally sticks in its accounting since the medieval era, but had finally decided to get rid of these old records. Two cartloads of tallies were burned in furnaces in the palace’s basement, but the fire spread and engulfed the building, taking with it the country’s standards of measurement.
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To Peirce, fallibilism meant that there are no facts in life that are beyond doubt. Everything we believe exists with the possibility that it will be proven wrong, from the base evidence of our senses to the most elaborate, rigorously tested, and apparently flawless scientific theories. The doctrine of fallibilism is distinguished from the approach of sceptics, who claim we can never know anything for sure, with the addendum that it is quite all right to believe that we know things (indeed, it is essential to living), but we must, at the same time, leave open the possibility that we are completely, spectacularly wrong.
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The speed of light defines the universe at its largest spans. It is reality’s speed limit: you cannot travel faster than the speed of light, and so you cannot transmit information beyond its reach. In other words: it cannot be exceeded. Planck’s constant, on the other hand, helps define the lower boundaries of reality by describing the smallest action possible for elementary particles. It cannot be subceeded. If the speed of light rules supreme among galaxies, black holes, and the spaces between stars, then Planck’s constant has for its domain atoms, electrons, and the pocketable abyss of the subatomic world.
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In Versailles, the vote in the auditorium is approved, as everyone expected, and the official definition of the kilogram is changed the following year. As the metrologists hoped, nobody who missed the news noticed. Theirs is an invisible discipline, their work hidden from the public view, tucked away at the end of a string of decimal places. Yet on these precarious digits hangs the world of modern measurement, and with it, the frontier of human understanding.
10: The managed life: Measurement’s place in modern society and in our understanding of ourselves
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The peanut butter belongs to a library of over 1,200 standard reference materials, or SRMs, created by NIST to meet the demands of industry and government. It is a bible of contemporary metrology, each listing testament to the importance of unseen measurement in our lives. Whenever something needs to be verified, certified, or calibrated– whether that is the emissions levels of a new diesel engine or the optical properties of glass destined for high- powered lasers– the SRM catalogue offers the standards against which checks can be made.
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Prior to the introduction of shipping containers, goods had to be packed on to ships by hand, an arduous process that required days of work by crews of longshoremen, adding to costs and slowing the movement of cargo. But being able to pack everything into one- size- fits- all boxes that could be hoisted off ships and on to trucks in minutes significantly lowered the price of moving material around the world, leading to an explosion in shipping. Today, shipping containers are the building blocks of the global economy, the standards that make it economically feasible to manufacture goods in one country, package them in a second, and sell them in a third. For better or worse, it is shipping containers that made fast fashion and the iPhone possible; that created the conditions that allow the world’s largest- ever corporations to exist.
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‘The problem is not measurement,’ writes Muller, ‘but excessive measurement and inappropriate measurement– not metrics, but metric fixation.’ 9 The roots of this ideology can be traced back to changes in capitalism beginning in the nineteenth century. This was a period when management in the US particularly was emerging as a profession in its own right, rather than a proficiency learned by industry natives. Between 1870 and 1990, the number of salaried managers in America increased 500 per cent, from 12,501 to 67,706, creating an entirely new type of business structure, which historian Alfred Chandler has identified as ‘managerial capitalism’. In contrast to ‘personal capitalism’, in which those making decisions about a business have a direct stake in its operations, such responsibility is instead outsourced to ‘teams, or hierarchies, of salaried managers who had little or no equity ownership in the enterprises they operated’.
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This compartmentalisation of labour led to the scientific management movement pioneered by efficiency- obsessed engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who advocated a set of working practices now known as Taylorism. Taylor and his followers analysed working practices through ‘time and motion studies’, which involved observing labourers and breaking down the flow of their work into constituent parts that could then be standardised. Like the row of butchers that inspired Ford’s aide, it was another act of disassembly. The aim, said Taylor, was to ‘develop a science to replace the old rule- of- thumb knowledge of the workmen’. 12 Importantly, this also necessitated a transfer of knowledge and power, from the labourers who carried out the work to the managers who oversaw it.
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The most benign thing that can be said about the Vietnam body count is that it was fabricated, with soldiers flinging AK- 47s on to farmers killed in their crossfire and marking them down as dead Viet Cong in order to meet the quotas set by their superiors. It is more accurate to say that it encouraged war crimes. American troops massacred civilians, children, and babies in the knowledge that they were unlikely to face punishment; they turned unimaginable human suffering into statistics because they understood that this was the nature of their war.
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In the case of Google’s and Facebook’s shareholders, making the world a better place primarily means selling adverts. Despite both companies’ wild and ambitious side projects, from virtual reality headsets to self- driving cars, their wealth is founded upon something much less utopian and glamorous: targeted advertising, which makes up between 80 and 90 per cent of both firms’ annual revenue.
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Walk 10,000 steps a day, we’re told, and health and happiness will be your reward. It’s presented with such authority and ubiquity that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the result of scientific enquiry, the distilled wisdom of numerous tests and trials. But no. Its origins are instead to be found in a marketing campaign by a Japanese company called Yamasa Clock. In 1965, the company was promoting a then novel gadget, a digital pedometer, and needed a snappy name for their new product. They settled on manpo- kei, or ‘10,000- steps meter’, the first instance of this metric being used to promote health. But why was this number chosen? Because the kanji for 10,000– and hence the first character in the product’s Japanese name,万歩計– looks like a figure striding forward with confidence. 35 There was no science to justify 10,000 steps, it seems, just a visual pun.
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‘More and more, for the average late modern subject in the “developed” western world, everyday life revolves around and amounts to nothing more than tackling an ever- growing to- do list.’ 43 This mindset, says Rosa, is the result of three centuries of cultural, economic, and scientific development, but these trends have become ‘newly radicalised’ in recent years thanks to digitalisation and the ferocity of unbridled capitalist competition. 44 The history of measurement tracks much of these developments, for not only is it a tool that has been embraced to better understand and control reality, but it now mediates much of our experience of the world, and, crucially, our experience of ourselves. As we measure more and more, we encounter the limits of this practice and wrestle with its disquieting effects on our lives. As noted by Rosa, these problems have been described in many forms by many thinkers over the centuries. For Karl Marx, it takes the form of alienation in our working lives, as we are separated from the products of our labour; for Max Weber, it is understood as the disenchantment of the world, in which the rationalisation of nature removes its magic and its meaning; and for Hannah Arendt, it is the distance created by science and technology that replaces the closeness of human intersubjectivity, of a world previously experienced communally alongside fellow human beings.
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Goodhart’s law– ‘Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes’– then turned into ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’ in a paper published in 1997 by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern.
Epilogue: The measures in the head
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I think that many of us have this sort of relationship with measurement in our lives, particularly self- measurement. We erect scaffolds of to- do lists and deadlines that are equal parts obligation and aspiration, and construct within their frame the person we want to be. We’re encouraged to do so perpetually; tips and guidance on how to be more productive, to achieve more, permeate culture. They fill our magazine pages and social media feeds, promising that this or that new method will be the key to greater productivity and personal fulfilment. This isn’t a new phenomenon by any means, but it is ferocious in its current onslaught. Increasingly, our ability to manage our time productively is seen not just as an advantage but as a virtue– judgement on our moral worth. The ancient Egyptians may have been the first to suggest that you could weigh the value of a soul, but thousands of years later such reckoning is ubiquitous. History shows that the borders of measurement’s domain are not fixed. They’ve expanded as scientists have learned the rewards of observation and flexed to accommodate folklore and mysticism. And while it’s no longer common to attribute miracles to measurement, as with the mensura Christi and saints’ tales of the Middle Ages, there is still a residue of that same magical thinking in how we treat measures today. We have a tendency to venerate numbers for their supposed objectivity, to believe that all of life’s problems are soluble with statistics.
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