Measurement's Hidden Role in Shaping Society

And the origins of our "modern discontents," with James Vincent

The history of measurement—how different units came to be, why they’re the specific sizes that they are, etc.—is the kind of topic you don’t often consider until someone like James Vincent writes a book about it. In Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants, and in conversation, James reveals how societies have measured the world around them—and how measurement has often been used as a tool of social and political control.

James is a senior editor for The Verge, the Vox Media site devoted to technology and society. James has written for the London Review of Books, Financial Times, and Wired. Beyond Measure was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022 and a finalist for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science & Technology.

A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. Paying subscribers can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes fun examples of the ways early societies measured time and distance, further discussion of conspiracy theories about the inch, and James wondering if I’m Canadian:

I did my own research on measurements of long-distance running

Ben: James, thank you so much for being here.

JV: Thanks so much for having me, Ben.

Ben: To ground our understanding of measurement, let’s begin with the science writer Robert P. Crease. What are the three crucial properties that units of measurement must possess, as he defines them?

JV: Histories of measurement go back to basically the start of recorded history—to when humans started gathering together in large numbers and forming the first cities. And Robert Crease defines three attributes that bind novel forms of measurement: accessibility, proportionality, and, and consistency. 

Accessibility because, to use a unit of measurement, it needs to be close at hand; proportionality because you want something that is proportional to a given task (you can measure a mountain with matchsticks, but it takes a long time); and consistency because measurement needs to have some sort of shared meaning and understanding.

Given these three requirements, one of the sources of measurement in just about every culture has been things readily at hand—

Ben: Or at foot, as it were.

JV: Exactly. The human body has been one of the most common sources of measurement. 

Ben: Another focus of your book is the intersection of measurement and power. You write that the regulation of units of measure “has been embraced by various political systems over the millennia.” Why has that been the case?

JV: Historically, there’s this huge link between authority figures and the regulation of measurement. 

If you look back at some of the earliest legal records, like the Code of Hammurabi, the famous Babylonian law text, it includes provisions saying that you should not give false measures to people. Or if you look at something like Magna Carta, the famous English legal document, it states very clearly that there should be one measure of wine throughout our whole realm, and one measure of ale and one measure of corn. Providing this consistency in measurement benefitted the populace, but it also gave leaders control. Once you control the measurements of the territory that you occupy, you have some control over people's daily lives. 

In many ways, this dynamic also led to the rise of the metric system in France.

France was suffering in the run-up to the French Revolution from a plurality of measurements. By one estimate, there were more than 1,000 recognizable units and 250,000 local variants. The plurality left people open to exploitation by feudal lords who would do things like collect taxes, in the form of grains, using bushels that were larger than the ones that the peasants used elsewhere. 

Ben: You note that in a huge survey of national grievances before the revolution, the need to standardize measurements was mentioned by members of the Third Estate (which was 96% of the country) more frequently than complaints about courts or infringement of personal liberties. 

So it wasn’t just a minor issue—it was a central issue.

JV: Right, so the French revolutionaries thought, well, we need to fix this. Their solution was to tear down all the old systems of measurement and create a completely new one, the metric system.

One of the big changes was going from the old standard length of distance, the pied du Roi, or “king’s foot,” to the meter, a new unit defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. To size the meter, they sent out a pair of astronomers to basically measure a good chunk of the European continent and then use that to extrapolate the unit of the meter. It took years, but it epitomized what the French revolutionaries were trying to do, which was to get rid of a unit of measurement literally derived from the bodily authority of the monarch and replace it with a measurement derived from the earth, the common inheritance of all of mankind, as they saw it. 

So the invention of the metric system was practical, but it was political as well.

Ben: And speaking of political, but maybe not practical, why didn't the US go metric?