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Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy.(Book Review) (book review)

Natural History, March, 2003, by Laurence A. Marschall

by Andro Linklater Walker & Company, 2002; $26

In January of 1790, addressing the new U.S. Congress for the first time, George Washington set forth three priorities for the fledgling nation: to defend its sovereignty, to strengthen its economy, and to establish a uniform system of weights and measures. In its modern-day guise of "homeland security," that first imperative continues to preoccupy Washington today, as does the economy. But the integrity of common measuring standards is secure across the land. Grain merchants no longer use larger bushels to buy from the farmer than to sell to the miller, and "a quarter-pounder" weighs the same in Boise as it does in Baltimore. The success of George Washington's program for reforming weights and measures, Andro Linklater argues, was essential not just to the eventual emergence of a consumer economy, but to the development of the national character of the United States.

What the founding fathers had in mind was not merely to establish fair and uniform measures, but also to create a framework for the general commerce of the nation. The central feature of this vision was to measure, to classify, to rationalize the land itself. Armed with standard English measuring chains (the origin of the twenty-two-yard-long unit), compasses, and transits (surveyor's instruments with mounted telescopes), the surveyors laid out a rectilinear grid from coast to coast, following imaginary beelines across rugged brush, treacherous mud-flats, and precipitous mountainsides.

The payofffor the surveyors' monumental effort was that it became easy to sell homesteads and mineral rights, to establish towns, to construct railroads and canals. America's reputation as a land where hard labor is repaid by success--a reputation that drew immigrants from far and near--has its roots in the uniform survey maps and section markers of these survey parties.

For all the good intentions, though, the measurement of America was neither as systematic nor as rational as its originators might have wished. Linklater cites a good many cases in which judgment was skewed by the inertia of local custom or the expedience of politics. One of his most entertaining and enlightening anecdotes is the story of how the U. S. might well have chosen the metric system from the start, given its clear superiority over pounds, gills, acres, and chains.

Thomas Jefferson led the fight for metric measurement, and was the most influential champion of a system based on decimal multiples of the length of a pendulum that swung through its arc once a second. Not only would the system be easy to manipulate; it also relied on a standard kept not by the government but, in effect, by the immutable laws of physics. By the time Washington addressed the Congress, it was conventional wisdom that some such scientifically based decimal system ought to guide the new nation, and decimalization of length and weight seemed only a vote away.

But the French Revolution changed all that. In the 1790s the French officially adopted a metric system based on the length of a quadrant of the Earth's meridian. The segment of longitude they chose to measure ran just to the east of Paris--decimal to be sure, but linked, unfortunately, with the geography of continental Europe. Congress, unable to properly distinguish Jefferson's system from the one tarred by the French Revolution, began to drag its feet, wondering why it should get rid of the familiar inches and yards in favor of a system based on a line through a foreign city.

By the time the system came up for a vote, surveyors had already begun to divide and sell vast tracts of land in the Ohio Valley, using the old English measures. The explosion of land sales settled the issue de facto: Too much time and money had already been invested in the old system. It was too late to change. The U.S. did adopt a decimal coinage. But the great land surveys, the building of the railroads, and the growth of American industrial society itself all took place under a uniform but cumbersome system of units first elaborated in the sixteenth century.

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.