Weights and Measures

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES

WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. Weights and measures throughout Europe during the early modern period were characterized by complexity and confusion and dominated by customary practices. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, they arose originally from Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and other roots and multiplied on local, regional, and state levels at a rapid pace after 1450. Among the principal causes for this proliferation were economic development, commercial competition, population growth, urbanization, taxation manipulations, territorial expansion, and technological progress. Contributing also were ineffective governmental decrees and legislative acts, the paucity and inferior workmanship of the physical standards manufactured to serve as prototypes, and the overwhelming number of poorly trained officials entrusted with inspection, verification, and enforcement duties.

Central governments contributed to weights and measures proliferation by promulgating multiple state standards for individual units, depending on where they were used and by whom. Sizes of units in capital cities were often different from those in the provinces or in rural areas. They even differed among social classes. On the other hand, common local units occasionally became so popular that they gained unit standardization. They then competed with state units, producing further confusion.

With the rapid growth of cities, weights and measures frequently separated into different standards depending on whether they were employed within the cities or outside their walls. A sharp division arose between urban and suburban measures. Similarly, some measuring units differed according to their use on land or on sea. A general rule throughout Europe was that measures always increased in size or distance once land was no longer in sight.

Product variations were the most important source for metrological proliferation. Those based on quantity measures varied by number or by an odd assortment of human, animal, and other capabilities. Even when these measures had standardized counts, capacities, or weights, the actual sizes depended on the characteristics of the products involved. Compounding this situation was the centuries-old practice of dividing existing units into halves, thirds, and fourths or into an irregular assortment of diminutives. Similar problems were assigning the same name to different units, basing one unit on a multiple or submultiple of another, bestowing more than one name on the same unit, and authorizing various methods of submultiple compilations for a given unit.

Further examples were units of account that were simply computational units for record keeping and other business purposes. Similarly, there were measures reserved for wholesale trade that referred to any number of other better-known units without any correlation to existing standards. Measures were also based on the monetary values of coins, on units of income derived through production, on crop yields and tax assessments, and on work functions, dimensions, and time allotments of humans and animals. The sizes of such units rested on a myriad of imprecise factors.

Regardless of such conditions, Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced a climate of change ushered in by the age of science and the Enlightenment. During this critical period, a number of developments occurred that altered metrological history profoundly, and eventually led to the creation and implementation of the metric system in France in 1793 and the imperial system in England in 1824.

First, there was the dynamic of scientific and technological invention and innovation that overthrew the rigid reliance on past traditions. The introduction of numerous new concepts, instruments, and procedures linked theoreticians with craftsmen for the first time and led to profound advancements in lenses, magnification glasses, microscopes, navigational, astronomical, and triangulation instruments, and clocks. These and hundreds of other breakthroughs, spearheaded chiefly by English, French, and Italian scientists, played a critical role in the reformation of weights and measures.

Second, many of these successes received stimulus and support from the European scientific societies that developed rapidly during the 1600s. By the end of the century, most serious scientists in Europe had become members of these societies, and their journals disseminated knowledge of new discoveries and inventions. In Italy the Roman Accademia dei Lincei and the Florentine Accademia del Cimento made significant scientific strides, the latter especially in its technological apparatus.

The most important societies for the future development of metrology, however, were the Royal Society of London and the Academy of Sciences of Paris and their offshoots, the Greenwich and Paris observatories. The English organizations cast their scientific net far and wide and made giant advancements in physics, astronomy, chemistry, and natural science which, coupled with their pioneering work in technological instruments, helped create a new era in weights and measures. Even more important were the Parisian groups whose scientists introduced the practice of using telescopes in conjunction with graduated circles for the precise measurement of angles. This led to measurements of the meridian arc and the computation of the radius of the Earth. This seminal work provided metrologists with possibilities for a natural physical standard that eventually became the basis for the metric system.

These and other advances led to the creation of hundreds of metrological reform proposals. In England the pendulum was given special emphasis. Since the second unit (of time) is determined by the motion of the earth, it was believed that the length of the second's pendulum in a given latitude would be an invariable quantity that could always be recovered or duplicated. Others proposed altering the existing system to conform to a decimal scale, eliminating all units except for a select few, and coordinating all units to a strict series of ratios. Unfortunately, the revamped English system of 1824 excluded any natural standard and opted only for streamlining the old system and establishing more accurate physical standards. The French proposals concluded far more successfully. After numerous experiments, France settled on a standard determined by the triangulation measurements of that portion of the meridian arc that ran from Dunkirk through Paris to Barcelona. In the process they established a new measure—the meter—as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Even though there eventually were some problems with the final measurements, a new era in world metrology had begun.

See also Enlightenment ; Mathematics ; Scientific Instruments .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berriman, Algernon E. Historical Metrology. London, 1953. An excellent study of the major issues in European metrological history.

Daumas, Maurice. Scientific Instruments of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century. New York, 1972. Shows the impact of technology on numerous metrological developments.

Kula, Witold. Measures and Men. Translated by Richard Szreter. Princeton, 1986. Important for the historical correlation between metrology and society.

Zupko, Ronald E. Revolution in Measurement: Western European Weights and Measures since the Age of Science. Philadelphia, 1990. Extensive coverage of medieval and early modern European weights and measures with a comprehensive bibliography on all issues.

——. "Weights and Measures." In Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. Vol. 6. New York, 1999. Tables of principal European units of measurement.

——. "Weights and Measures: Western European." In Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Vol. 12. New York, 1989. Europe-wide in scope with tables of equivalents; see also author's metrological articles in the other eleven volumes.

Ronald Edward Zupko