The Measure of Ourselves

Abstract

A story in which both Henry VIII and NASA make appearances is bound to intrigue historians. In Measuring America, Andro Linklater offers the history of the measurement of all sorts of things. The book delivers on the promise of its two-word title by telling the surprisingly lively tale of the development and adoption of various forms of measurement from the period of settlement to the present. The subtitle, however, promises both a political exceptionalism and a technological triumphalism on which the author cannot deliver. In trying to contextualize measurement, Linklater sometimes offers plausible insights but more often makes grand claims that will sit uneasily with professional historians and for which they will certainly want more evidence. The title reveals the author's hope of positioning the book to capture the audience that made Dava Sobel's Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (1995) an unexpected bestseller. Sobel's book introduced readers to a problem that few likely knew had been a problem: the difficulties inherent in finding one's east-west position when out on the featureless expanse of the ocean. She told a compelling tale of how John Harrison, a modest clockmaker, developed a solution. The success of Longitude has encouraged a spate of imitators such as Simon Winchester with his The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (2001). Like these authors, Linklater is attempting to offer a story of the satisfyingly concrete, how things really work and how we came to know them. These popularizations of the history of science and technology all run up against similar problems. Narratives of technological innovation are impossible to disentangle from questions of reception and dissemination, of meaning and significance, in short, of their relationships to the deep structures of culture. These authors are offering yet another version of great history, albeit with modest clockmakers, geologists, and surveyors as the heroes, but their claims for the significance of these men are