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 two-tenths of an inch during the fire--but there was no way of getting it to the blaze. Company after company discovered that their hoses would not fit Baltimore hydrants. An unidentified engineer with the water department told the Baltimore Sun, "If there had been nozzles enough ... we could have fairly flooded the burning district."

When the fire finally burned itself out after 30 hours, all the telephone, telegraph and electric service had been cut off in the 70-block area. All the banks and many of the insurance companies had burned down, along with the brokerage houses and most retail and wholesale businesses.

Ironically, in October of the same year, shortly after the Bureau of Standards opened new laboratories in the nation's capital, a fire broke out in dry leaves near the building. Night watchman Franklin Durston gathered up all the hose he could find, but the threads of the Bureau of Standards' own hoses did not match and he could get no water to the blaze. He succeeded in stamping out the fire, but the lesson of Baltimore had been dramatically reinforced. Bureau investigators soon found that 600 different sizes and varieties of hose couplings were then being used in the United States.

By 1905 national standards for fire hoses were adopted but laws were not quickly put into effect. In October 1964, 60 years after the Baltimore fire, the city learned that firemen in an adjoining county were requesting that fireplugs which did not fit hoses made to the national standard be marked with fluorescent paint so firefighters could tell where special adapters were needed.

Inevitably, the early 20th century brought a general rush to establish safety standards for everything from the strength of elevator cables to safety levels for gas appliances. In the winter of 1922-23, carbon-monoxide poisoning caused 42 deaths in Baltimore. The gas-appliance industry kept blaming the deaths on suicides, but once the standards took effect on gas appliances, carbon-monoxide deaths dropped dramatically to one or two a year.

Mobilization for war always brings a push for standardization to increase efficiency and save scarce materials. In World War I, scarcity changed fashions dramatically-almost overnight the shortage of leather did away with high-button shoes, and the shortage of steel resulted in a type of corset that let women breathe freely. Simplified standards reduced labor costs by 35 percent and the costs of some materials were cut in half.

In World War II, government standard setters continued their own battle against inefficiency and waste by devising a series of design and performance, standards that made possible the development of synthetic rubber and new alloys. They also developed quality-control tests for synthetics and saved tons of copper and nickel with new standards for the Government Printing Office.

Some of the work was regarded with suspicion. Early in 1945, for instance, it was discovered that while the hard-pressed nation was at war, Bureau of Standards Director Lyman J. Briggs was conducting a study of the bounce characteristics of baseballs. Briggs explained that he had only analyzed the results--a high school boy had done the experiments. The rubber shortage was acute (gas rationing had been instituted partly to save rubber) and the manufacture of standard baseballs had been prohibited because their cork centers were cushioned in rubber. The experiments were supposed to determine whether new cork-center balls without the rubber cushioning were a satisfactory substitute. Briggs learned that a hard-hit experimental ball tended to drop 30 feet shorter than the old rubber-cushioned balls.

Today, when a few parts per million can determine matters of life and death around the world, standard setters are under enormous pressure to achieve uniformity at greater precision than ever before. The tiniest microdeviation from perfect tolerances can make space ships go off course and airplanes malfunction.

The latest edition of boiler standards, published in July 1983, runs to 8,500 pages. Altogether, more than 25,000 items are covered by national standards of one kind or another, from movie seats and two-by-fours to television systems. The United States standardized its color-TV transmissions in 1953. Europe set its color standards in the 1960s--employing a technology which some viewers argue produces a better picture.

The foundation of all modem measurement is an international system based on seven basic standards. These are the standards which define the modem metric system. They are: the kilogram (mass), the meter (length), the second (time), the ampere (electric current), the kelvin (temperature), the mole (chemical substance) and the candela (light). The kilogram is based on an actual physical object. The other standards are based on natural phenomena, i.e., formulas that can be reproduced in laboratories throughout the world because they are based on natural laws. In October 1983, the official international standard for the meter was changed to "the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during one-299,792,458th of a second." The second is now defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom." If that seems unhandy, it has a point in its favor--it is the most accurate measurement modern science has yet come up with.

Scientists in the National Bureau of Standards are currently trying to find a "natural" definition of the kilogram to replace Kilogram 20. That is the cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy which President Benjamin Harrison unpacked at a special ceremony in his office in 1890 after it had been shipped from France. Ever since then, this particular hunk of metal has remained the official stan-dard of mass in the United States. All of our pounds and ounces have been taken from it, just as the piece of metal from which it was copied has remained the international standard.

The United States has two of the original 40 copies, Kilo 20 and Kilo 4. Kilo 20 is used only to calibrate "working" standards, which are then used for calibrating others, and Kilo 4 is used only for comparisons with Kilo 20. Under the provisions of the Treaty of the Meter, which was signed in France in 1875 by 21 countries, all of the copies were to be returned periodically to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres for comparisons. Wars intervened with shocking regularity, however, and Kilo 20 has been back to Paris only three times--in 1937, 1948 and 1983. Transported by a Bureau scientist carrying a special chamois-lined brass container--which under special international papers customs officials are not allowed to open--Kilo 20 was accompanied by Kilo 4 for the first time in 1983. The crucial comparisons took months. Kilo 4 had not changed weight since 1890, Kilo 20 had changed by less than 20-billionths of a kilogram, an allowable magnitude of error, and so no changes in measurements resulted.

Back in 1821 John Quincy Adams believed that the metric system might usher in an era of peace and goodwill among men, but he did not think the American public would put up with the change. And how right he was. Metrics are now used by scientists and schoolchildren all over the world. They are widely accepted in manufacturing and international trade. But they have been only haltingly adopted in the United States. When service stations put in liter measurements for gasoline after the 1979 oil embargo brought prices above $1 per gallon, the public balked. The industry backed down.

Dr. John K. Taylor, a longtime Bureau of Standards employee, understands the average person's cantankerous affection for capricious pounds, yards and gallons. Still, like Adams, he holds to the ancient dream that proper standards promote justice, order and peace. "Problems are best solved when people can measure things by the same standards," he says quietly. Until that ideal can be realized on a higher level, we will just have to hold things together with standardized bolts--and hope.

The author, a Washington, D.C., free-lancer, served on President Carter's staff as a speech writer. This article was published with written permission for online use. All other rights are retained by the author.