By Achsah Nesmith - Illustrations by Mike Ramus

From our screw threads and fire hydrants to railroad track and the metric system, most standards proved very hard to come by

The Sandersville Railroad was built in the 1890s by citizens who wanted to link their central Georgia town with neighboring Tennille, three miles away, and by way of Tennille's main-line railroad, with the world. When the little railroad came on hard times in 1916, the surviving owners turned to an up-and-coming young man named Ben J. Tarbutton and made him an offer. If he could restore its profitability, ensuring the town continued service, he could buy the railroad at a reasonable price. Tarbutton had no railroad experience, but he was single and eager to move around, so he agreed to try.

Soon he had put the Sandersville back in the black, cheerfully tooting between the two towns with three round trips a day, and the railroad was his. As its president, he eagerly wrote the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad offering to exchange passes, a common practice among railroad officials in that day. The Northerner refused, noting acidly that the Pennsylvania had thousands of miles of track connecting major cities while all three miles of Sandersville track were within Washington County. "It is true that my railroad may not be as long as yours," Tarbutton is said to have replied, "but it, sir, is just as wide."

At one point, gangs of women in Erie, Pennsylvania, began tearing up rails to frustrate government attempts at standardizing the width of track.

Switching tracks, but not the trains

Tarbutton's sons, Ben Jr. and Hugh, still run the profitable little railroad. The fact that it was and still is the same width as the Pennsylvania came about through one of the most dramatic instances of mass standardization that ever took place. During two spring days in 1886, the rails were moved on more than 11,000 miles of track stretching from Virginia to Florida and Texas. When the great shift was over, trains could travel from the South to the North or the West without much of the time-consuming transfers of passengers and changing of wheels at connecting points that had gone on before. By Wednesday morning, June 2, 1886, the South's rails at last matched the gauge used by the mighty Pennsylvania.

In 1985, when every drug and stationery store sells standard notebook paper to fit your child's notebook, light bulbs to fit your lamp and film to fit your camera, it is hard to imagine what things were like when almost nothing was "standardized" except some of the most basic weights and measures, and even a number of those were inexact.

In 1789, the Constitution charged Congress with fixing standard weights and measures. In his first annual address President Washington urged action. So did Thomas Jefferson, who advocated an elaborate decimal measuring system based on the length of a swinging bar whose period was two seconds. But it was not until December 1819 that Congress ordered a study of the question and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was asked to look into the matter. Early in 1821, Adams produced a book-length report that became a classic on the subject--but it did not move Congress to act.

Adams admired the metric system extravagantly, but instead of recommending it, he concentrated on measurements accessible to the average man, aiming at least to bring workable standards of measure to American customhouses where weights and measures continued to vary disconcertingly. "The avoirdupois pound of Alexandria," he reported, "is one of the most defective in the Union … and the half bushel is too small," by 16 cubic inches. Adams also complained about the "New York yard" because it was "too short." Since the national government depended on tariffs collected at customhouses, the problem was indeed serious.

Serious, but not new. Adams' study pointed out that "from the earliest records of Parliamentary history," English statutes were "filled with ineffectual attempts of the legislature to establish uniformity." Since ancient times, too, prophets and potentates had dreamed that uniform weights and measures would produce justice, order, sound economy and good government, but the road to standardization was always a hard one to travel. The Hebrew historian Josephus credits Cain, the first tiller of the soil (as well as the first murderer), with inventing measures. Even in ancient times, falsification of weights and measures was not uncommon. One Hebrew proverb proclaimed that "divers weights are an abomination to the Lord."

 A Saxon yard (highly variable) was based on average girth of an Englishman.

"Man is the measure of all things," the Greek philosopher Protagoras wrote, and indeed, for a time, he very nearly was. The cubit, widely used throughout the ancient world, was originally based on the length of a man's forearm (the Egyptian hieroglyph for a cubit was a forearm) but the exact measure varied enormously. Egypt, for instance, had both the cubit of the man (17.72 inches) and the cubit of the king (20.62 inches). Still, measurements for such structures as the Great Pyramid of Giza turned out to be remarkably accurate.

John Adams considered it an important innovation when the Greeks introduced a standard foot--based on Hercules' foot, the story goes. The Romans added a mile made up of 1,000 paces. In England, the Saxon yard supposedly was based on the girth of a man, but Henry I found the measure so variable that he decreed a yard would henceforth equal the length of his own arm.

Along with rights for nobles, the Magna Carta called for "one measure for ale, one measure for wine, one measure for corn." But, in 1496, Henry VII thought that meant equating dry and liquid measures and his attempts at standardization added new levels of confusion. Many common measures grew up within the trades-land measured in rods, horses in hands, diamonds in carats (from the weight of a single carob seed), cloth in yards, printer's type in points--and none of them related to the others. Well into the 19th century, Adams found, Britain's system of weights and measures was "in ruins."

But a decade after Adams exhaustively documented the discrepancies existing in America's weights and measures, nothing had been done. Finally, in 1830, a Swiss-born metrologist named Ferdinand Hassler was hired to study the matter again. Brilliant, irascible, dedicated to scientific accuracy, Hassler was quite oblivious to political practicalities or everyday economic necessities. He based the national standard of length on an 82-inch bar fashioned by the English instrument maker Edward Troughton. He fixed the official yard at the interval between the 27- and 63-inch marks, or 36 inches.

When the number of boiler explosions reached 1,400 a year, in 1910, American engineers established safety standards that all but eliminated the problem.

When Hassler sent for the weights and measures being used by all the custornhouses around the country, many reported back that they had none. He thereupon established the standards himself, ordering duplicates made for each state and every customhouse in America.

Hassler had been authorized only to report on the country's weights-and-measures problem, but Congress was so impressed by his zeal that it approved his unilateral actions after the fact. Yet when Hassler died in 1834, after trying to protect his precious surveying instruments in a storm, only a third of the states were using standardized measures of length. The last official standard measures in some states were not established until 1856.

By then, the rise of industrialization had created a need for new types of standards that neither Protagoras nor King Henry could possibly have imagined. If machines were to produce efficiently, all parts needed to be exactly interchangeable. During the Civil War, standard sizes in men's ready-made clothing were introduced to solve the problem of putting masses of men into uniform. In 1863, the Secretary of the Navy managed to set a standard gauge for diameters of bolts, nuts and screw threads--though only for use in Navy yards.

The great day in 1886 when Southern rails were uniformly moved to conform to the narrower gauge of the Pennsylvania was a delayed Civil War victory for the North. One of the first railroads in the country, the South Carolina, which ran from Charleston to Hamburg, had 136 miles of track by 1833. That made it the longest railroad in the world. It was originally built to a 5-foot gauge and railroad builders all over the South followed suit. Meanwhile, in the North, the majority of railroad tracks were built to a "standard" width which actually ranged from 4 feet 8 1/2 inches to 4 feet 10 inches, but some tracks were even wider than that. The Erie, for example, stretched a full 6 feet between the rails.

One of the first serious efforts to bring uniformity to Northern rail gauges in 1853 resulted in bloody riots in places like Erie, Pennsylvania. As a junction point where three different widths of railroad met, Erie citizens stood to lose hundreds of jobs created by the need to load and unload, as well as jack up, all the arriving can in order to change their wheels. With so much well-paid work to lose, city officials refused to grant the railroads the right to close streets and bridges while the track-width changes were made, and the governor of Pennsylvania backed them. Families and even church congregations split into factions over the issue. At one point, a mob of women took sledgehammers and were tearing up the various tracks until federal marshals moved in.

In 1918, a leather shortage killed high-button shoes, brought uniform footware.

In fact, there was no overwhelming practical reason for the adoption of the 4-foot 8 1/2-inch gauge in North America. (Some early locomotives, imported from Britain, had been built to travel the 4-foot 8 1/2-inch gauge established by Parliament.) The balance was probably tipped in favor of the narrower gauge by President Lincoln's call, in 1862, for a railroad to link the nation from sea to sea. The resulting road was known as the Union Pacific; legislation enacted in 1864 specified a "standard" 4-foot 8 1/2-inch gauge track.

By 1886 that gauge, along with 4-foot 9-inch track, dominated the nation, in part because rolling stock could be used more or less interchangeably on both. By then, too, the cost of changing wheels and reloading cars weighed heavily on Southern railroads. Early in 1886 they agreed to convert and chose the Pennsylvania's 4-foot 9-inch width.

When the day came for moving the rails, crews set out across the South at 3:30 A.M. on Monday, May 31. Passenger trains were placed on special schedules and shippers notified that freight deliveries would be delayed. Georgia had the most track, with 2,413 miles, but according to the Savannah News everything went so smoothly that passengers were barely aware of the great rail shift.

The railroads standardized time simply by agreeing to change their clocks (SMITHSONIAN, November 1983). No legislation was required. A standard time and standardized track were profitable to the companies involved. But setting reasonable standards for safety to the public was a thornier and more costly question. In the latter part of the 19th century, an epidemic of boiler explosions accompanied the spread of steam power. In 1865 the Mississippi riverboat Sultana exploded, killing 1,450 Union soldiers just released from Confederate prisons. In 1894, at the Henry Clay Mine in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, 27 boilers exploded simultaneously, leveling the surrounding town and killing thousands of people. During the period from 1870 to 1910, at least 10,000 boiler explosions were recorded in the United States and adjoining areas of Canada and Mexico. In 1910, with explosions totaling 1,400 a year, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers got together to write a comprehensive boiler code. Quickly adopted by most states and cities, it virtually eliminated explosions.

As science and technology advanced, the need for additional standards became ever more apparent.  In 1894, a system of standard values for basic units of electricity-including the farad (capacity), the ohm (resistance) and the watt (power) was worked out. By 1901, the National Bureau of Standards was in place (SMITHSONIAN, September and October 1978). It took the great Baltimore fire of 1904, though, to further underscore the need for product standards.

On Sunday, February 7, at 10:40 A.M., an automatic fire alarm went off in the basement of Baltimore's John E. Hurst wholesale dry-goods warehouse. Within ten minutes an explosion spread the fire to neighboring buildings. Borne by the wind, the flames spread through the central business district. Wooden stables and sheds dotted the alleys between "completely fireproof" buildings of steel-reinforced concrete, stone and brick. Once the fire was out of control, the heat became so intense that masonry structures seemed to burst into spontaneous flames. By 11:40 A.M. the fire department's chief engineer, George W Horton, sent a telegram to Washington: "Desperate fire here. Must have help at once." By 12:47 the first firemen and engines had been loaded onto a special train in Washington and made the trip in almost record time, 38 minutes. Baltimore crowds cheered, but the rescuing firemen soon found that their hoses would not fit the Baltimore hydrants. They wrapped them to the plugs with improvised canvas "bandages," but the streams of water were so weak the men had to hold nozzles dangerously close to the flames.

Additional engine companies arrived from Philadelphia, New York, Wilmington and Annapolis. Firefighters for the Pennsylvania Railroad made the ten-hour trip from Altoona. There never was any scarcity of water--the reservoir actually rose