Modern life would be impossible without standardised measurements.
In this episode, we look at the development of measurements through history, explaining they evolved over time and why some succeeded where others failed.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about measurements.
[00:00:27] Why do we use certain universally agreed upon measurements of length, weight, and time, where did this all come from, and what does it mean?
[00:00:37] It might sound like a mundane, boring subject, but in today’s episode we’ll go from Ancient Egypt to Medieval England, we’ll meet French revolutionaries with revolutionary ideas about the weights and dates, we’ll find out why shipping containers are in fact revolutionary, and we’ll learn that it’s only by chance that ice doesn’t freeze at 100 degrees Centigrade.
[00:01:02] OK, then, A Short History of Measurements.
[00:01:08] Imagine, if you will, a world without measurements.
[00:01:13] No hours, no metres, no weights, no temperatures.
[00:01:17] It would certainly make life somewhat trickier, somewhat more difficult.
[00:01:22] But of course, before humans, there were no measurements; every measurement is a human invention, these hugely important parts of everyday life are completely man-made, they are artificial.
[00:01:36] So, in this episode we are going to look at two broad categories of the development of measurements.
[00:01:44] Firstly, the creation of measurements, from length to time.
[00:01:49] And secondly, the standardisation of these measurements, because having a measurement isn’t very useful if there isn’t a universally agreed-upon definition.
[00:01:59] If my kilogramme is twice as heavy as your kilogramme and half as heavy as my neighbour’s kilogramme, what’s the point of calling it a kilogramme in the first place?
[00:02:11] So, first off, let’s talk about an old English measurement of distance.
[00:02:18] To those of you who have been to the UK and seen signs about something called miles, no I’m not talking about that. I’m actually talking about something older, a measurement that you might not have heard of unless you are a horse racing fan.
[00:02:36] And this is the Furlong.
[00:02:40] Now, from an etymological point of view, this word comes from a combination of two words in Old English.
[00:02:48] Furh, the old word for “furrow”, which is the hollow trench, the hole, that a plough carves in the ground, and long, meaning, well, long.
[00:03:00] A furlong was the distance that a pair of oxen or working cows who were pulling the plough could cover before they needed to stop for a rest.
[00:03:12] Clever, right?
[00:03:13] But obviously somewhat inaccurate. If you had two lazy oxen who needed to rest after 30 seconds, your furlong would be pretty short.
[00:03:24] And if you had two super strong oxen who wouldn’t get tired, well a furlong would be quite long.
[00:03:32] Nevertheless, the furlong was a common measurement, and it would go on to be a measurement that would be used to calculate the size of what became the English acre, or the size of a field.
[00:03:45] Interestingly enough, the furlong was an official British measurement until 1985!
[00:03:52] By the way, if you’re still wondering about how long a furlong actually is, it is now universally agreed at 201 metres, although if you go to the UK and you ask someone how many furlongs it is to a museum, they will give you a slightly confused look.
[00:04:11] Anyway, we’ll see a theme here, that measurements understandably originate from semi-universal activities, activities that would be the same anywhere, that often used physical objects or activities that everyone would be aware of and would be at least somewhat similar.
[00:04:31] Now, let’s move across the English Channel and look at another interesting example from France.
[00:04:39] You’ll see that the French approached a similar problem, of how to measure distance and the area of a field, in a very different way.
[00:04:50] In one part of France - Bourges - land was measured by how many baskets of seeds would be required to sow it.
[00:05:00] This basket size was called a setier. This meant that the agreed unit, the amount of land that could be sown using that amount of seeds, became known as the seterée.
[00:05:14] Clearly, much like the English example of lazy or strong oxen creating different interpretations of a furlong, a seterée wasn’t an exact measurement, as everyone would sow their seeds slightly differently.
[00:05:30] This being said, using this unit was actually more useful than you might think, because it did give you - in some respects - a better understanding of how productive a piece of land would be than simply saying how big it was. If land was unevenly distributed, or there were bushes or ponds in the middle, this seterée measurement took this into account, while if you were calculating the dimensions of the field, this calculation would be more complicated.
[00:06:03] It was still, however, like the furlong, imperfect.
[00:06:07] Both the furlong and the seterée were what we’d call elastic measurements, measurements that change depending on who is doing the measuring.
[00:06:17] As you can imagine, they aren’t particularly good forms of measurements, but these elastic measurements have been the dominant type of measurement for almost all of human history.
[00:06:29] Now, if we move from the physical world to the theoretical world, and talk about the artificial construct of splitting time into different units, for the majority of human history, units of time have had different lengths.
[00:06:46] For example, the ancient Egyptians simply counted 10 units of daylight, and added two additional ones for the early morning and the evening time.
[00:06:57] This worked fine for the ancient Egyptians. They were pretty close to the equator, so the length of a day didn’t vary too much.
[00:07:07] But clearly, the further you are away from the equator, the less useful this form of measurement becomes.
[00:07:15] So, take a Londoner in, say, the year 1500.
[00:07:20] Using a similar form of measurement their hour could vary from 38 minutes in the depths of winter to 82 minutes in the middle of summer when there were more hours of sunlight.
[00:07:33] At first glance, you might think that this would've made life very complicated for our Medieval Londoner.
[00:07:40] But, as far as the records show, it actually wasn’t so much of an issue.
[00:07:45] Thinking of an hour as a consistent measure simply was not part of how people thought.
[00:07:52] The majority of people worked outside on the land. It was second nature to adapt to the changing rhythm of the season. What’s more, church bells would ring throughout the day to mark the hours and you would rarely need to pre-arrange an exact time with someone coming from far away.
[00:08:11] So you simply didn’t need to worry about it.
[00:08:15] Now, we’ve looked at length and time, and seen some examples how this was approached by the English, the French and the Egyptians.
[00:08:24] It’s now time to move on to the second section of this little exploration, where we look at attempts to standardise measurements.
[00:08:33] For this, let’s look at perhaps the greatest and most successful human experiment with standardising distance and weight – the metric system.
[00:08:44] In order to do this I need to take you back to France in the early 1700s when the seeds of the French Revolution were being sown.
[00:08:55] Central to the grievances or complaints of the French peasants was the way in which, when selling their goods in markets, they often felt cheated by merchants and aristocrats who were in greater positions of power.
[00:09:10] There were literally hundreds of different measurements across the whole of France. The varieties were usually regional, in other words, they were only used in particular parts of the country.
[00:09:22] When the national assembly, or the Estates General, met in 1789 in the lead up to the Revolution, a demand to standardise weights and measures was high on the agenda.
[00:09:36] Interestingly, this issue was mentioned more frequently than complaints about the courts or about the infringement of personal liberties.
[00:09:45] And it’s from here that the metric system was born.
[00:09:49] It came both from the urgent need to solve this pressing, practical problem and a more idealistic motive which had to do with the Enlightenment.
[00:10:00] If you know much about The Enlightenment, or you’ve listened to episode number 149, you’ll remember that this movement, which had at its core the idea that science and reason could solve many of humanity's problems, the movement was particularly strong in France.
[00:10:18] So, French Enlightenment thinkers set out to create a new system of weights and measures which was based not on the size of a human’s foot or hand or how far his oxen could plough, but on proper mathematical principles.
[00:10:35] Allied to this system was the desire to make things simpler through decimalisation.
[00:10:42] This movement was spearheaded by two highly regarded men, astronomers with a mission, Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain.
[00:10:53] Their heroic task, which began in 1792, was to calculate the Meridian, or the distance from the North Pole to the South Pole.
[00:11:03] Why?
[00:11:04] Because they had decided that the metric unit of measurement, the metre, should be the length of the Meridian divided by 10 million.
[00:11:15] Simple? Well, not really.
[00:11:18] Using the best techniques of measurement available at the time, which can actually be traced back to work of the Greek mathematician Euclid, by the way, these two men set about doing this through measuring the distance of a proportion of the Meridian.
[00:11:34] In practice, this meant calculating the exact distance from the French coastal port of Dunkerque, via Paris, to the Spanish city of Barcelona.
[00:11:45] They started in 1792, the year before the luckless King Louis XVI was executed, and finished in 1795.
[00:11:55] One went North and the other went South.
[00:11:58] After further deliberations and a huge amount of checking their calculations, on the 22nd of June 1799 the definitive metre length platinum bar was unveiled in Paris.
[00:12:13] They got it almost right, only miscalculating by 0.02% because they hadn’t taken into account the flattening of the Earth.
[00:12:23] But it’s still pretty good going if you ask me.
[00:12:27] Now, on to creating the standard measurement of weight, the kilogramme.
[00:12:33] The kilogramme was originally defined as being the weight of the volume of 1,000 cubic centimetres of water.
[00:12:41] Essentially, if you have a box, 10cm by 10cm by 10cm and fill that with water, that should weigh exactly one kilogramme.
[00:12:53] Through some pretty complicated technical calculations, the mathematicians eventually arrived at this common unit of weight, which was captured through the original, exact platinum kilogramme weight.
[00:13:07] And the metric system has, clearly, been an enormous success.
[00:13:12] It's now used by 95% of the world’s population.
[00:13:17] But not all attempts to make the system of measurement more logical have had the same success.
[00:13:24] After the great success of the creation of the metric system, the French also tried to replicate it with the system of measuring time.
[00:13:34] On June the 8th of 1794, the influential French revolutionary, Robespierre, celebrated something called the Festival of the Supreme Being.
[00:13:45] This was a festival in celebration of the new way of telling the time, the decimal way.
[00:13:52] Gone were the old fashioned months, based on Roman gods.
[00:13:56] Gone were the illogical 24 hour days and seven day week.
[00:14:02] Instead, we had a calendar based on the activities for rural France.
[00:14:07] There were 10 months, each with 3 weeks of 10 days each.
[00:14:12] Every month got a new name, based on what was happening in France.
[00:14:17] In the Spring there was the month of flowering, Floreal.
[00:14:21] The hottest month was called Thermidor and the coldest was called Nivôse, which comes from the French word for snow.
[00:14:30] Within each week of 10 days, the day would be split into 10 hours, each of 100 minutes and 100 seconds.
[00:14:39] If you’ve been doing the maths in your head - firstly, congratulations - and secondly, you’ll have worked out that one second in this system was equal to 0.864 seconds today.
[00:14:52] But if this is all giving you a bit of a sore head and you are wondering whether you need to know more about it if you travel to Paris, fear not.
[00:15:02] Although the Revolution and the introduction of the metric system undoubtedly was a massive achievement for France and the rest of the world, these plans to make time and weeks decimal did not have the same effect.
[00:15:16] The system of decimal time was abandoned after two years, and the Republican calendar after twelve.
[00:15:23] Now, moving to the present day, it’s time to talk about an invention that has revolutionised global trade.
[00:15:31] And one you might not think about: the standardised shipping container.
[00:15:37] Now, what is a shipping container?
[00:15:39] Put simply, it's only a steel box with standard dimensions.
[00:15:44] It’s 8 feet across, or 2.44 metres.
[00:15:48] It’s 8'6" tall, or 2.59 metres.
[00:15:52] And it’s either 20 or 40 feet long, so that’s 6.10 or 12.2 metres long.
[00:15:59] The dimensions in themselves aren’t important, but rather the fact that practically every shipping container in the world uses the same ones.
[00:16:10] The reason the standardisation of the container was so important was that it massively reduced the time required to load and unload goods onto ships and railways.
[00:16:22] Before, there was a team of men who were employed to load and unload everything, packing it and unpacking it. It took a long time and was expensive.
[00:16:34] In the 1950s, an American entrepreneur called Malcolm McLean had an idea: to create a standard size so that the boxes could be packed and unpacked away from the dock, thereby saving time and money.
[00:16:50] His invention was a rip roaring success. The boxes could be packed on top of each other like Lego bricks, they could be easily loaded and unloaded, and to this day these are the standard dimensions for a shipping container.
[00:17:07] Now, before we end this episode, we have time for three curiosities, or pieces of trivia about measurement.
[00:17:15] Let me start with one that is particularly British, but might reveal something about Britain, the British people, and how we aren’t sure exactly what we want.
[00:17:27] In the same way that, as Brexit showed, Britain has always had an uneasy relationship with Europe, so it has an uneasy or ambivalent relationship with the metric system.
[00:17:40] Brits will talk quite naturally about "going for a pint" at the same time as in discussing "running the hundred metres."
[00:17:47] In British towns, signs indicating the distance on foot paths tend to be in metres, but on the roads, you talk about miles per hour, miles per gallon and how many miles it is from London to Birmingham.
[00:18:03] Strangely enough, the UK is the only country that still uses both systems, although the Imperial system of pounds and ounces is used less and less every year, even if our friends over the pond still insist on using it.
[00:18:20] Now, for our second curiosity we must travel to the USA and specifically visit the United States' National Institute of Standards and Technology or the NIST.
[00:18:32] This organisation establishes the standards for everything from peanut butter to cigarettes.
[00:18:39] For example, the standard jar of peanut butter has exact proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, sugars and fibre that are set down by the NIST. Every atom in the jar, including all the chemical properties and trace elements are measured and established by this organisation.
[00:19:01] The standard cigarette, on the other hand, which is known by its standard reference materials or SRM [#1196 in this case by the way] can be found at NIST.
[00:19:14] You might think that it’s somewhat unnecessary to have a standard measure of cigarette, but it does have its uses especially when it comes to safety.
[00:19:24] As you may know, cigarettes left on beds or sofas after the smoker has fallen asleep are one of the main causes of death by fire in the home.
[00:19:35] In order therefore to test the resistance to fire of mattresses, sofas and sheets a standard cigarette needs to be used.
[00:19:44] This scientific emphasis on sameness and consistency may seem a little dull, a little boring and unnecessary, but it is saving lives every day.
[00:19:56] Now, our final curiosity has to do with temperature - something we have not covered yet today, but clearly something we are all aware of.
[00:20:06] Again, our friends in the USA are slightly strange here, as they are one of the three countries in the world that still uses Fahrenheit. If you’re interested, the other two are Liberia and the Cayman Islands.
[00:20:19] If you’re from a sensible, Centigrade-using country, it may surprise you to find out that the Centigrade system, which was invented by a Swedish scientist called Anders Celsius in 1741, was originally the other way round.
[00:20:35] In other words, Celsius’ original scale had 100º C at the bottom for the temperature at which water freezes and 0º C at the top for water’s boiling point.
[00:20:49] No one knows exactly when the scale was inverted or turned around, but, just think, you could just as easily be talking about winter coming and with it the temperature rising to 100*.
[00:21:03] So, there you go, whether you’re buying vegetables in a supermarket, you’re wondering how long it will take you to get to your friend’s house, or you’re shocked at how much weight you’ve put on in December, next time you step on the scales or get out your measuring tape, I hope you’ll realise that there’s much more to measurements than meets the eye.
[00:21:25] OK then, that is it for today's episode on A Short History of Measurements, this interesting story of something we can all relate to but that has a fascinating history.
[00:21:36] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:40] Can you imagine a world without measurements?
[00:21:43] What are some other interesting stories of measurements that we didn’t mention?
[00:21:48] Do you think we’ll ever attempt to move to a different system of measuring time?
[00:21:52] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:56] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:04] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:09] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about measurements.
[00:00:27] Why do we use certain universally agreed upon measurements of length, weight, and time, where did this all come from, and what does it mean?
[00:00:37] It might sound like a mundane, boring subject, but in today’s episode we’ll go from Ancient Egypt to Medieval England, we’ll meet French revolutionaries with revolutionary ideas about the weights and dates, we’ll find out why shipping containers are in fact revolutionary, and we’ll learn that it’s only by chance that ice doesn’t freeze at 100 degrees Centigrade.
[00:01:02] OK, then, A Short History of Measurements.
[00:01:08] Imagine, if you will, a world without measurements.
[00:01:13] No hours, no metres, no weights, no temperatures.
[00:01:17] It would certainly make life somewhat trickier, somewhat more difficult.
[00:01:22] But of course, before humans, there were no measurements; every measurement is a human invention, these hugely important parts of everyday life are completely man-made, they are artificial.
[00:01:36] So, in this episode we are going to look at two broad categories of the development of measurements.
[00:01:44] Firstly, the creation of measurements, from length to time.
[00:01:49] And secondly, the standardisation of these measurements, because having a measurement isn’t very useful if there isn’t a universally agreed-upon definition.
[00:01:59] If my kilogramme is twice as heavy as your kilogramme and half as heavy as my neighbour’s kilogramme, what’s the point of calling it a kilogramme in the first place?
[00:02:11] So, first off, let’s talk about an old English measurement of distance.
[00:02:18] To those of you who have been to the UK and seen signs about something called miles, no I’m not talking about that. I’m actually talking about something older, a measurement that you might not have heard of unless you are a horse racing fan.
[00:02:36] And this is the Furlong.
[00:02:40] Now, from an etymological point of view, this word comes from a combination of two words in Old English.
[00:02:48] Furh, the old word for “furrow”, which is the hollow trench, the hole, that a plough carves in the ground, and long, meaning, well, long.
[00:03:00] A furlong was the distance that a pair of oxen or working cows who were pulling the plough could cover before they needed to stop for a rest.
[00:03:12] Clever, right?
[00:03:13] But obviously somewhat inaccurate. If you had two lazy oxen who needed to rest after 30 seconds, your furlong would be pretty short.
[00:03:24] And if you had two super strong oxen who wouldn’t get tired, well a furlong would be quite long.
[00:03:32] Nevertheless, the furlong was a common measurement, and it would go on to be a measurement that would be used to calculate the size of what became the English acre, or the size of a field.
[00:03:45] Interestingly enough, the furlong was an official British measurement until 1985!
[00:03:52] By the way, if you’re still wondering about how long a furlong actually is, it is now universally agreed at 201 metres, although if you go to the UK and you ask someone how many furlongs it is to a museum, they will give you a slightly confused look.
[00:04:11] Anyway, we’ll see a theme here, that measurements understandably originate from semi-universal activities, activities that would be the same anywhere, that often used physical objects or activities that everyone would be aware of and would be at least somewhat similar.
[00:04:31] Now, let’s move across the English Channel and look at another interesting example from France.
[00:04:39] You’ll see that the French approached a similar problem, of how to measure distance and the area of a field, in a very different way.
[00:04:50] In one part of France - Bourges - land was measured by how many baskets of seeds would be required to sow it.
[00:05:00] This basket size was called a setier. This meant that the agreed unit, the amount of land that could be sown using that amount of seeds, became known as the seterée.
[00:05:14] Clearly, much like the English example of lazy or strong oxen creating different interpretations of a furlong, a seterée wasn’t an exact measurement, as everyone would sow their seeds slightly differently.
[00:05:30] This being said, using this unit was actually more useful than you might think, because it did give you - in some respects - a better understanding of how productive a piece of land would be than simply saying how big it was. If land was unevenly distributed, or there were bushes or ponds in the middle, this seterée measurement took this into account, while if you were calculating the dimensions of the field, this calculation would be more complicated.
[00:06:03] It was still, however, like the furlong, imperfect.
[00:06:07] Both the furlong and the seterée were what we’d call elastic measurements, measurements that change depending on who is doing the measuring.
[00:06:17] As you can imagine, they aren’t particularly good forms of measurements, but these elastic measurements have been the dominant type of measurement for almost all of human history.
[00:06:29] Now, if we move from the physical world to the theoretical world, and talk about the artificial construct of splitting time into different units, for the majority of human history, units of time have had different lengths.
[00:06:46] For example, the ancient Egyptians simply counted 10 units of daylight, and added two additional ones for the early morning and the evening time.
[00:06:57] This worked fine for the ancient Egyptians. They were pretty close to the equator, so the length of a day didn’t vary too much.
[00:07:07] But clearly, the further you are away from the equator, the less useful this form of measurement becomes.
[00:07:15] So, take a Londoner in, say, the year 1500.
[00:07:20] Using a similar form of measurement their hour could vary from 38 minutes in the depths of winter to 82 minutes in the middle of summer when there were more hours of sunlight.
[00:07:33] At first glance, you might think that this would've made life very complicated for our Medieval Londoner.
[00:07:40] But, as far as the records show, it actually wasn’t so much of an issue.
[00:07:45] Thinking of an hour as a consistent measure simply was not part of how people thought.
[00:07:52] The majority of people worked outside on the land. It was second nature to adapt to the changing rhythm of the season. What’s more, church bells would ring throughout the day to mark the hours and you would rarely need to pre-arrange an exact time with someone coming from far away.
[00:08:11] So you simply didn’t need to worry about it.
[00:08:15] Now, we’ve looked at length and time, and seen some examples how this was approached by the English, the French and the Egyptians.
[00:08:24] It’s now time to move on to the second section of this little exploration, where we look at attempts to standardise measurements.
[00:08:33] For this, let’s look at perhaps the greatest and most successful human experiment with standardising distance and weight – the metric system.
[00:08:44] In order to do this I need to take you back to France in the early 1700s when the seeds of the French Revolution were being sown.
[00:08:55] Central to the grievances or complaints of the French peasants was the way in which, when selling their goods in markets, they often felt cheated by merchants and aristocrats who were in greater positions of power.
[00:09:10] There were literally hundreds of different measurements across the whole of France. The varieties were usually regional, in other words, they were only used in particular parts of the country.
[00:09:22] When the national assembly, or the Estates General, met in 1789 in the lead up to the Revolution, a demand to standardise weights and measures was high on the agenda.
[00:09:36] Interestingly, this issue was mentioned more frequently than complaints about the courts or about the infringement of personal liberties.
[00:09:45] And it’s from here that the metric system was born.
[00:09:49] It came both from the urgent need to solve this pressing, practical problem and a more idealistic motive which had to do with the Enlightenment.
[00:10:00] If you know much about The Enlightenment, or you’ve listened to episode number 149, you’ll remember that this movement, which had at its core the idea that science and reason could solve many of humanity's problems, the movement was particularly strong in France.
[00:10:18] So, French Enlightenment thinkers set out to create a new system of weights and measures which was based not on the size of a human’s foot or hand or how far his oxen could plough, but on proper mathematical principles.
[00:10:35] Allied to this system was the desire to make things simpler through decimalisation.
[00:10:42] This movement was spearheaded by two highly regarded men, astronomers with a mission, Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain.
[00:10:53] Their heroic task, which began in 1792, was to calculate the Meridian, or the distance from the North Pole to the South Pole.
[00:11:03] Why?
[00:11:04] Because they had decided that the metric unit of measurement, the metre, should be the length of the Meridian divided by 10 million.
[00:11:15] Simple? Well, not really.
[00:11:18] Using the best techniques of measurement available at the time, which can actually be traced back to work of the Greek mathematician Euclid, by the way, these two men set about doing this through measuring the distance of a proportion of the Meridian.
[00:11:34] In practice, this meant calculating the exact distance from the French coastal port of Dunkerque, via Paris, to the Spanish city of Barcelona.
[00:11:45] They started in 1792, the year before the luckless King Louis XVI was executed, and finished in 1795.
[00:11:55] One went North and the other went South.
[00:11:58] After further deliberations and a huge amount of checking their calculations, on the 22nd of June 1799 the definitive metre length platinum bar was unveiled in Paris.
[00:12:13] They got it almost right, only miscalculating by 0.02% because they hadn’t taken into account the flattening of the Earth.
[00:12:23] But it’s still pretty good going if you ask me.
[00:12:27] Now, on to creating the standard measurement of weight, the kilogramme.
[00:12:33] The kilogramme was originally defined as being the weight of the volume of 1,000 cubic centimetres of water.
[00:12:41] Essentially, if you have a box, 10cm by 10cm by 10cm and fill that with water, that should weigh exactly one kilogramme.
[00:12:53] Through some pretty complicated technical calculations, the mathematicians eventually arrived at this common unit of weight, which was captured through the original, exact platinum kilogramme weight.
[00:13:07] And the metric system has, clearly, been an enormous success.
[00:13:12] It's now used by 95% of the world’s population.
[00:13:17] But not all attempts to make the system of measurement more logical have had the same success.
[00:13:24] After the great success of the creation of the metric system, the French also tried to replicate it with the system of measuring time.
[00:13:34] On June the 8th of 1794, the influential French revolutionary, Robespierre, celebrated something called the Festival of the Supreme Being.
[00:13:45] This was a festival in celebration of the new way of telling the time, the decimal way.
[00:13:52] Gone were the old fashioned months, based on Roman gods.
[00:13:56] Gone were the illogical 24 hour days and seven day week.
[00:14:02] Instead, we had a calendar based on the activities for rural France.
[00:14:07] There were 10 months, each with 3 weeks of 10 days each.
[00:14:12] Every month got a new name, based on what was happening in France.
[00:14:17] In the Spring there was the month of flowering, Floreal.
[00:14:21] The hottest month was called Thermidor and the coldest was called Nivôse, which comes from the French word for snow.
[00:14:30] Within each week of 10 days, the day would be split into 10 hours, each of 100 minutes and 100 seconds.
[00:14:39] If you’ve been doing the maths in your head - firstly, congratulations - and secondly, you’ll have worked out that one second in this system was equal to 0.864 seconds today.
[00:14:52] But if this is all giving you a bit of a sore head and you are wondering whether you need to know more about it if you travel to Paris, fear not.
[00:15:02] Although the Revolution and the introduction of the metric system undoubtedly was a massive achievement for France and the rest of the world, these plans to make time and weeks decimal did not have the same effect.
[00:15:16] The system of decimal time was abandoned after two years, and the Republican calendar after twelve.
[00:15:23] Now, moving to the present day, it’s time to talk about an invention that has revolutionised global trade.
[00:15:31] And one you might not think about: the standardised shipping container.
[00:15:37] Now, what is a shipping container?
[00:15:39] Put simply, it's only a steel box with standard dimensions.
[00:15:44] It’s 8 feet across, or 2.44 metres.
[00:15:48] It’s 8'6" tall, or 2.59 metres.
[00:15:52] And it’s either 20 or 40 feet long, so that’s 6.10 or 12.2 metres long.
[00:15:59] The dimensions in themselves aren’t important, but rather the fact that practically every shipping container in the world uses the same ones.
[00:16:10] The reason the standardisation of the container was so important was that it massively reduced the time required to load and unload goods onto ships and railways.
[00:16:22] Before, there was a team of men who were employed to load and unload everything, packing it and unpacking it. It took a long time and was expensive.
[00:16:34] In the 1950s, an American entrepreneur called Malcolm McLean had an idea: to create a standard size so that the boxes could be packed and unpacked away from the dock, thereby saving time and money.
[00:16:50] His invention was a rip roaring success. The boxes could be packed on top of each other like Lego bricks, they could be easily loaded and unloaded, and to this day these are the standard dimensions for a shipping container.
[00:17:07] Now, before we end this episode, we have time for three curiosities, or pieces of trivia about measurement.
[00:17:15] Let me start with one that is particularly British, but might reveal something about Britain, the British people, and how we aren’t sure exactly what we want.
[00:17:27] In the same way that, as Brexit showed, Britain has always had an uneasy relationship with Europe, so it has an uneasy or ambivalent relationship with the metric system.
[00:17:40] Brits will talk quite naturally about "going for a pint" at the same time as in discussing "running the hundred metres."
[00:17:47] In British towns, signs indicating the distance on foot paths tend to be in metres, but on the roads, you talk about miles per hour, miles per gallon and how many miles it is from London to Birmingham.
[00:18:03] Strangely enough, the UK is the only country that still uses both systems, although the Imperial system of pounds and ounces is used less and less every year, even if our friends over the pond still insist on using it.
[00:18:20] Now, for our second curiosity we must travel to the USA and specifically visit the United States' National Institute of Standards and Technology or the NIST.
[00:18:32] This organisation establishes the standards for everything from peanut butter to cigarettes.
[00:18:39] For example, the standard jar of peanut butter has exact proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, sugars and fibre that are set down by the NIST. Every atom in the jar, including all the chemical properties and trace elements are measured and established by this organisation.
[00:19:01] The standard cigarette, on the other hand, which is known by its standard reference materials or SRM [#1196 in this case by the way] can be found at NIST.
[00:19:14] You might think that it’s somewhat unnecessary to have a standard measure of cigarette, but it does have its uses especially when it comes to safety.
[00:19:24] As you may know, cigarettes left on beds or sofas after the smoker has fallen asleep are one of the main causes of death by fire in the home.
[00:19:35] In order therefore to test the resistance to fire of mattresses, sofas and sheets a standard cigarette needs to be used.
[00:19:44] This scientific emphasis on sameness and consistency may seem a little dull, a little boring and unnecessary, but it is saving lives every day.
[00:19:56] Now, our final curiosity has to do with temperature - something we have not covered yet today, but clearly something we are all aware of.
[00:20:06] Again, our friends in the USA are slightly strange here, as they are one of the three countries in the world that still uses Fahrenheit. If you’re interested, the other two are Liberia and the Cayman Islands.
[00:20:19] If you’re from a sensible, Centigrade-using country, it may surprise you to find out that the Centigrade system, which was invented by a Swedish scientist called Anders Celsius in 1741, was originally the other way round.
[00:20:35] In other words, Celsius’ original scale had 100º C at the bottom for the temperature at which water freezes and 0º C at the top for water’s boiling point.
[00:20:49] No one knows exactly when the scale was inverted or turned around, but, just think, you could just as easily be talking about winter coming and with it the temperature rising to 100*.
[00:21:03] So, there you go, whether you’re buying vegetables in a supermarket, you’re wondering how long it will take you to get to your friend’s house, or you’re shocked at how much weight you’ve put on in December, next time you step on the scales or get out your measuring tape, I hope you’ll realise that there’s much more to measurements than meets the eye.
[00:21:25] OK then, that is it for today's episode on A Short History of Measurements, this interesting story of something we can all relate to but that has a fascinating history.
[00:21:36] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:40] Can you imagine a world without measurements?
[00:21:43] What are some other interesting stories of measurements that we didn’t mention?
[00:21:48] Do you think we’ll ever attempt to move to a different system of measuring time?
[00:21:52] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:56] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:04] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:09] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about measurements.
[00:00:27] Why do we use certain universally agreed upon measurements of length, weight, and time, where did this all come from, and what does it mean?
[00:00:37] It might sound like a mundane, boring subject, but in today’s episode we’ll go from Ancient Egypt to Medieval England, we’ll meet French revolutionaries with revolutionary ideas about the weights and dates, we’ll find out why shipping containers are in fact revolutionary, and we’ll learn that it’s only by chance that ice doesn’t freeze at 100 degrees Centigrade.
[00:01:02] OK, then, A Short History of Measurements.
[00:01:08] Imagine, if you will, a world without measurements.
[00:01:13] No hours, no metres, no weights, no temperatures.
[00:01:17] It would certainly make life somewhat trickier, somewhat more difficult.
[00:01:22] But of course, before humans, there were no measurements; every measurement is a human invention, these hugely important parts of everyday life are completely man-made, they are artificial.
[00:01:36] So, in this episode we are going to look at two broad categories of the development of measurements.
[00:01:44] Firstly, the creation of measurements, from length to time.
[00:01:49] And secondly, the standardisation of these measurements, because having a measurement isn’t very useful if there isn’t a universally agreed-upon definition.
[00:01:59] If my kilogramme is twice as heavy as your kilogramme and half as heavy as my neighbour’s kilogramme, what’s the point of calling it a kilogramme in the first place?
[00:02:11] So, first off, let’s talk about an old English measurement of distance.
[00:02:18] To those of you who have been to the UK and seen signs about something called miles, no I’m not talking about that. I’m actually talking about something older, a measurement that you might not have heard of unless you are a horse racing fan.
[00:02:36] And this is the Furlong.
[00:02:40] Now, from an etymological point of view, this word comes from a combination of two words in Old English.
[00:02:48] Furh, the old word for “furrow”, which is the hollow trench, the hole, that a plough carves in the ground, and long, meaning, well, long.
[00:03:00] A furlong was the distance that a pair of oxen or working cows who were pulling the plough could cover before they needed to stop for a rest.
[00:03:12] Clever, right?
[00:03:13] But obviously somewhat inaccurate. If you had two lazy oxen who needed to rest after 30 seconds, your furlong would be pretty short.
[00:03:24] And if you had two super strong oxen who wouldn’t get tired, well a furlong would be quite long.
[00:03:32] Nevertheless, the furlong was a common measurement, and it would go on to be a measurement that would be used to calculate the size of what became the English acre, or the size of a field.
[00:03:45] Interestingly enough, the furlong was an official British measurement until 1985!
[00:03:52] By the way, if you’re still wondering about how long a furlong actually is, it is now universally agreed at 201 metres, although if you go to the UK and you ask someone how many furlongs it is to a museum, they will give you a slightly confused look.
[00:04:11] Anyway, we’ll see a theme here, that measurements understandably originate from semi-universal activities, activities that would be the same anywhere, that often used physical objects or activities that everyone would be aware of and would be at least somewhat similar.
[00:04:31] Now, let’s move across the English Channel and look at another interesting example from France.
[00:04:39] You’ll see that the French approached a similar problem, of how to measure distance and the area of a field, in a very different way.
[00:04:50] In one part of France - Bourges - land was measured by how many baskets of seeds would be required to sow it.
[00:05:00] This basket size was called a setier. This meant that the agreed unit, the amount of land that could be sown using that amount of seeds, became known as the seterée.
[00:05:14] Clearly, much like the English example of lazy or strong oxen creating different interpretations of a furlong, a seterée wasn’t an exact measurement, as everyone would sow their seeds slightly differently.
[00:05:30] This being said, using this unit was actually more useful than you might think, because it did give you - in some respects - a better understanding of how productive a piece of land would be than simply saying how big it was. If land was unevenly distributed, or there were bushes or ponds in the middle, this seterée measurement took this into account, while if you were calculating the dimensions of the field, this calculation would be more complicated.
[00:06:03] It was still, however, like the furlong, imperfect.
[00:06:07] Both the furlong and the seterée were what we’d call elastic measurements, measurements that change depending on who is doing the measuring.
[00:06:17] As you can imagine, they aren’t particularly good forms of measurements, but these elastic measurements have been the dominant type of measurement for almost all of human history.
[00:06:29] Now, if we move from the physical world to the theoretical world, and talk about the artificial construct of splitting time into different units, for the majority of human history, units of time have had different lengths.
[00:06:46] For example, the ancient Egyptians simply counted 10 units of daylight, and added two additional ones for the early morning and the evening time.
[00:06:57] This worked fine for the ancient Egyptians. They were pretty close to the equator, so the length of a day didn’t vary too much.
[00:07:07] But clearly, the further you are away from the equator, the less useful this form of measurement becomes.
[00:07:15] So, take a Londoner in, say, the year 1500.
[00:07:20] Using a similar form of measurement their hour could vary from 38 minutes in the depths of winter to 82 minutes in the middle of summer when there were more hours of sunlight.
[00:07:33] At first glance, you might think that this would've made life very complicated for our Medieval Londoner.
[00:07:40] But, as far as the records show, it actually wasn’t so much of an issue.
[00:07:45] Thinking of an hour as a consistent measure simply was not part of how people thought.
[00:07:52] The majority of people worked outside on the land. It was second nature to adapt to the changing rhythm of the season. What’s more, church bells would ring throughout the day to mark the hours and you would rarely need to pre-arrange an exact time with someone coming from far away.
[00:08:11] So you simply didn’t need to worry about it.
[00:08:15] Now, we’ve looked at length and time, and seen some examples how this was approached by the English, the French and the Egyptians.
[00:08:24] It’s now time to move on to the second section of this little exploration, where we look at attempts to standardise measurements.
[00:08:33] For this, let’s look at perhaps the greatest and most successful human experiment with standardising distance and weight – the metric system.
[00:08:44] In order to do this I need to take you back to France in the early 1700s when the seeds of the French Revolution were being sown.
[00:08:55] Central to the grievances or complaints of the French peasants was the way in which, when selling their goods in markets, they often felt cheated by merchants and aristocrats who were in greater positions of power.
[00:09:10] There were literally hundreds of different measurements across the whole of France. The varieties were usually regional, in other words, they were only used in particular parts of the country.
[00:09:22] When the national assembly, or the Estates General, met in 1789 in the lead up to the Revolution, a demand to standardise weights and measures was high on the agenda.
[00:09:36] Interestingly, this issue was mentioned more frequently than complaints about the courts or about the infringement of personal liberties.
[00:09:45] And it’s from here that the metric system was born.
[00:09:49] It came both from the urgent need to solve this pressing, practical problem and a more idealistic motive which had to do with the Enlightenment.
[00:10:00] If you know much about The Enlightenment, or you’ve listened to episode number 149, you’ll remember that this movement, which had at its core the idea that science and reason could solve many of humanity's problems, the movement was particularly strong in France.
[00:10:18] So, French Enlightenment thinkers set out to create a new system of weights and measures which was based not on the size of a human’s foot or hand or how far his oxen could plough, but on proper mathematical principles.
[00:10:35] Allied to this system was the desire to make things simpler through decimalisation.
[00:10:42] This movement was spearheaded by two highly regarded men, astronomers with a mission, Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain.
[00:10:53] Their heroic task, which began in 1792, was to calculate the Meridian, or the distance from the North Pole to the South Pole.
[00:11:03] Why?
[00:11:04] Because they had decided that the metric unit of measurement, the metre, should be the length of the Meridian divided by 10 million.
[00:11:15] Simple? Well, not really.
[00:11:18] Using the best techniques of measurement available at the time, which can actually be traced back to work of the Greek mathematician Euclid, by the way, these two men set about doing this through measuring the distance of a proportion of the Meridian.
[00:11:34] In practice, this meant calculating the exact distance from the French coastal port of Dunkerque, via Paris, to the Spanish city of Barcelona.
[00:11:45] They started in 1792, the year before the luckless King Louis XVI was executed, and finished in 1795.
[00:11:55] One went North and the other went South.
[00:11:58] After further deliberations and a huge amount of checking their calculations, on the 22nd of June 1799 the definitive metre length platinum bar was unveiled in Paris.
[00:12:13] They got it almost right, only miscalculating by 0.02% because they hadn’t taken into account the flattening of the Earth.
[00:12:23] But it’s still pretty good going if you ask me.
[00:12:27] Now, on to creating the standard measurement of weight, the kilogramme.
[00:12:33] The kilogramme was originally defined as being the weight of the volume of 1,000 cubic centimetres of water.
[00:12:41] Essentially, if you have a box, 10cm by 10cm by 10cm and fill that with water, that should weigh exactly one kilogramme.
[00:12:53] Through some pretty complicated technical calculations, the mathematicians eventually arrived at this common unit of weight, which was captured through the original, exact platinum kilogramme weight.
[00:13:07] And the metric system has, clearly, been an enormous success.
[00:13:12] It's now used by 95% of the world’s population.
[00:13:17] But not all attempts to make the system of measurement more logical have had the same success.
[00:13:24] After the great success of the creation of the metric system, the French also tried to replicate it with the system of measuring time.
[00:13:34] On June the 8th of 1794, the influential French revolutionary, Robespierre, celebrated something called the Festival of the Supreme Being.
[00:13:45] This was a festival in celebration of the new way of telling the time, the decimal way.
[00:13:52] Gone were the old fashioned months, based on Roman gods.
[00:13:56] Gone were the illogical 24 hour days and seven day week.
[00:14:02] Instead, we had a calendar based on the activities for rural France.
[00:14:07] There were 10 months, each with 3 weeks of 10 days each.
[00:14:12] Every month got a new name, based on what was happening in France.
[00:14:17] In the Spring there was the month of flowering, Floreal.
[00:14:21] The hottest month was called Thermidor and the coldest was called Nivôse, which comes from the French word for snow.
[00:14:30] Within each week of 10 days, the day would be split into 10 hours, each of 100 minutes and 100 seconds.
[00:14:39] If you’ve been doing the maths in your head - firstly, congratulations - and secondly, you’ll have worked out that one second in this system was equal to 0.864 seconds today.
[00:14:52] But if this is all giving you a bit of a sore head and you are wondering whether you need to know more about it if you travel to Paris, fear not.
[00:15:02] Although the Revolution and the introduction of the metric system undoubtedly was a massive achievement for France and the rest of the world, these plans to make time and weeks decimal did not have the same effect.
[00:15:16] The system of decimal time was abandoned after two years, and the Republican calendar after twelve.
[00:15:23] Now, moving to the present day, it’s time to talk about an invention that has revolutionised global trade.
[00:15:31] And one you might not think about: the standardised shipping container.
[00:15:37] Now, what is a shipping container?
[00:15:39] Put simply, it's only a steel box with standard dimensions.
[00:15:44] It’s 8 feet across, or 2.44 metres.
[00:15:48] It’s 8'6" tall, or 2.59 metres.
[00:15:52] And it’s either 20 or 40 feet long, so that’s 6.10 or 12.2 metres long.
[00:15:59] The dimensions in themselves aren’t important, but rather the fact that practically every shipping container in the world uses the same ones.
[00:16:10] The reason the standardisation of the container was so important was that it massively reduced the time required to load and unload goods onto ships and railways.
[00:16:22] Before, there was a team of men who were employed to load and unload everything, packing it and unpacking it. It took a long time and was expensive.
[00:16:34] In the 1950s, an American entrepreneur called Malcolm McLean had an idea: to create a standard size so that the boxes could be packed and unpacked away from the dock, thereby saving time and money.
[00:16:50] His invention was a rip roaring success. The boxes could be packed on top of each other like Lego bricks, they could be easily loaded and unloaded, and to this day these are the standard dimensions for a shipping container.
[00:17:07] Now, before we end this episode, we have time for three curiosities, or pieces of trivia about measurement.
[00:17:15] Let me start with one that is particularly British, but might reveal something about Britain, the British people, and how we aren’t sure exactly what we want.
[00:17:27] In the same way that, as Brexit showed, Britain has always had an uneasy relationship with Europe, so it has an uneasy or ambivalent relationship with the metric system.
[00:17:40] Brits will talk quite naturally about "going for a pint" at the same time as in discussing "running the hundred metres."
[00:17:47] In British towns, signs indicating the distance on foot paths tend to be in metres, but on the roads, you talk about miles per hour, miles per gallon and how many miles it is from London to Birmingham.
[00:18:03] Strangely enough, the UK is the only country that still uses both systems, although the Imperial system of pounds and ounces is used less and less every year, even if our friends over the pond still insist on using it.
[00:18:20] Now, for our second curiosity we must travel to the USA and specifically visit the United States' National Institute of Standards and Technology or the NIST.
[00:18:32] This organisation establishes the standards for everything from peanut butter to cigarettes.
[00:18:39] For example, the standard jar of peanut butter has exact proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, sugars and fibre that are set down by the NIST. Every atom in the jar, including all the chemical properties and trace elements are measured and established by this organisation.
[00:19:01] The standard cigarette, on the other hand, which is known by its standard reference materials or SRM [#1196 in this case by the way] can be found at NIST.
[00:19:14] You might think that it’s somewhat unnecessary to have a standard measure of cigarette, but it does have its uses especially when it comes to safety.
[00:19:24] As you may know, cigarettes left on beds or sofas after the smoker has fallen asleep are one of the main causes of death by fire in the home.
[00:19:35] In order therefore to test the resistance to fire of mattresses, sofas and sheets a standard cigarette needs to be used.
[00:19:44] This scientific emphasis on sameness and consistency may seem a little dull, a little boring and unnecessary, but it is saving lives every day.
[00:19:56] Now, our final curiosity has to do with temperature - something we have not covered yet today, but clearly something we are all aware of.
[00:20:06] Again, our friends in the USA are slightly strange here, as they are one of the three countries in the world that still uses Fahrenheit. If you’re interested, the other two are Liberia and the Cayman Islands.
[00:20:19] If you’re from a sensible, Centigrade-using country, it may surprise you to find out that the Centigrade system, which was invented by a Swedish scientist called Anders Celsius in 1741, was originally the other way round.
[00:20:35] In other words, Celsius’ original scale had 100º C at the bottom for the temperature at which water freezes and 0º C at the top for water’s boiling point.
[00:20:49] No one knows exactly when the scale was inverted or turned around, but, just think, you could just as easily be talking about winter coming and with it the temperature rising to 100*.
[00:21:03] So, there you go, whether you’re buying vegetables in a supermarket, you’re wondering how long it will take you to get to your friend’s house, or you’re shocked at how much weight you’ve put on in December, next time you step on the scales or get out your measuring tape, I hope you’ll realise that there’s much more to measurements than meets the eye.
[00:21:25] OK then, that is it for today's episode on A Short History of Measurements, this interesting story of something we can all relate to but that has a fascinating history.
[00:21:36] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:21:40] Can you imagine a world without measurements?
[00:21:43] What are some other interesting stories of measurements that we didn’t mention?
[00:21:48] Do you think we’ll ever attempt to move to a different system of measuring time?
[00:21:52] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:56] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:04] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:09] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
