Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants

by James Vincent

These included familiar terms like kilo for 1,000 units and cent for 0.01 parts, but also less common terms like demi for a half unit and now forgotten prefixes like myria, for multiples of 10,000.

This means that individual thinkers should not only be unconstrained by the edicts of tyrants and priests, but that they should also have material support. The main barriers to improvement, says Condorcet, are the three inequalities: inequality of wealth, inequality of status, and inequality of instruction. Remedy these and society becomes a huge improving machine, the gears of education and teaching and learning working in a great virtuous cycle, each generation improving upon the last. ‘[A]s facts multiply, the human mind learns to classify them and reduce them to more general facts, and the instruments and methods used to observe and measure them acquire a new precision,’ writes Condorcet.

The man often credited with the creation of this grid is Thomas Jefferson: third president of the United States, slaveholder, American savant, and an exponent of the same Enlightenment values that shaped the metric system. Jefferson had lived and worked in Paris from 1784, becoming Minister to France in 1785, and was closely acquainted with the ideals underpinning metric weights and measures.

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.

When the UK voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, one BBC political reporter identified this dispute over weights and measures as a watershed moment for the Brexit project: an event that ‘helped turn public opinion against EU membership, giving critics something tangible to point to that affected people’s everyday lives and for which Brussels appeared responsible