Those dreams died – along with some of the revolution’s bolder imaginings, such as the 10-day week. Litres and kilograms, commonplace now, once acted as the heralds of a new world: rational, scientific, humane – building, measure by measure, a finer, happier world. And no surprise that opposition to metricisation takes the form of outsized patriotism – from Victorians who believed the pyramids were built using British measures to Boris Johnson’s attempted resurrection of imperial units in time for the jubilee. No wonder that the metre (marking one 10-millionth of the distance from the north pole to the equator) was originally proposed by revolutionary France as an internationalist gesture, a paving stone on the road to universal human friendship. James Vincent: ‘a nimble storyteller, and a sympathetic one’. A standard founded on the underlying structure of the universe would, by contrast, be universally usable and universally accessible: fraternity through the tape measure. Old systems of measurement based on the human body – such as the hand-to-elbow cubit, or the thumb-width inch – were intuitive but inaccurate, as variable as human beings themselves. When absolute monarchy was toppled, measurement’s ancien regime fell with it. France in the throes of revolution is Vincent’s paradigm here. Only natural, then, that sea changes in the way we live affect the way we measure.
When French commoners demand “One king, one law, one weight and one measure”, or medieval townsfolk petition for a municipal clock, we’re reminded that however abstruse measurement appears, it’s never distant: a life shared with hundreds, let alone millions of people, would be unthinkable without it. Legal systems, such as England’s court of piepowder (“the lowest and the most expeditious court of justice in England”), greased the gears of a society dependent on trusted standards – and uneasily conscious of how fragile those standards actually were. Special police forces, such as the Byzantine empire’s bullotai, roamed the empire checking weights. Vincent is a nimble storyteller, and a sympathetic one: his sensitivity to the human drama at work behind the grand theories is particularly visible in his treatment of the chaotic centuries before standardisation. We call them rulers for a reason.ĭefining and maintaining standard weight and volume – particularly in the all-consuming food and drink trade – continued as one of the state’s central obligations for millennia.
Early on, the right to assess – and enforce – measurement became concomitant with political authority. Nilometers in ancient Egypt, Vincent discovers on a trip to the country, could tell Nile-side worriers how far fertilising flood waters had risen that spring, predicting feast or famine later in the year.Įven today, the gravity attached to the yearly ritual is almost palpable: dead pharaohs would be buried with measure-sticks in hand. A sharper sense of weather – an eye, in other words, for measurement – made harvests predictable. In agricultural society, the ability to measure the passage of time – to follow a calendar, a pattern of sowing and reaping – made harvests possible. Old systems of measurement based on the human body were intuitive but inaccurate, as variable as human beings themselves What motivation could there possibly be for this kind of devotion? In the first instance, Vincent says, the simplest imaginable: survival. Thirty-two thousand years later, that transformation is still unfolding, as measurement embeds itself ever further into our lives, from work to health, love to death: the world made data.Ī Fitbit is some distance from a bone ruler, and the gap marks a huge expenditure of energy across a vast expanse of time during which generations laboured over finer and finer gradations of measurement.
And although the physical properties measurements refer to existed before the names humans coined to describe them, James Vincent notes in Beyond Measure, the point at which people developed systems to quantify the physical world around them was a moment of transformation for our species. None of the gauges and instruments we use to make sense of the world around us existed. And no weight, no mass, no height, no volume. O nce upon a time there was no time at all.
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