In the south-west suburbs of Paris, a grand villa sits in attractive parkland. Once owned by Marie Antoinette, the villa now houses the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, an intergovernmental agency founded in 1875 to maintain universal standards of measurement across the world. Locked in a vault in the basement of the Saint-Cloud villa, you will find a piece of metal, no larger than a child’s fist, made of platinum and iridium. This is the kilogram prototype, the physical object against which all other weights are measured.

The kilogram prototype, or Ur-kilogram, was built to last. Without it, there would be no way to truly standardize the measurements in everything from single-dose pharmaceuticals to large-scale engineering projects. The problem is that the kilogram prototype has been losing mass, slowly but surely, over the last century and a half (Frost, 2018). Shedding perhaps no more than a tiny grain of sand over its lifetime, this loss of mass means that the Ur-kilogram is no longer exactly the same weight as it was when it was made in the late nineteenth century. And if the universal standard for editorial weights is untethered from its core property – unchangeability – then true commensuration becomes virtually impossible.

The kilogram prototype offers a kind of moral lesson about the nature of measurement. Just when we think we have pinned down the precise quantity of a phenomenon, even something as basic as weight, we find that it quickly slips from our fingertips. This provides a warning to psychologists who draw conclusions from IQ scores; managers who subject their employees to aptitude tests; and policy-makers who want to measure the happiness levels of a nation. In all of these cases, we might wonder whether intelligence, aptitude, and happiness are just like that small lump of alloy kept under lock and key in a Paris vault: quantities that seem so immutable, but for one reason or another begin to change over time in strange and unpredictable ways, throwing our common systems of measurement out of whack.

The Ur-kilogram also tells a story of how organizations are mobilized in the effort to impose measures on the rest of the world. Like a series of Russian dolls, one organization enfolds another for

the sole purpose of maintaining strict standards of universal measurement: the International Bureau of Weights and Measures is controlled by the International Committee for Weights and Measures, which is in turn controlled by the General Conference on Weights and Measures – the ultimate authority that approves the International System of Units, encompassing time, length, mass, electricity, temperature, substance, and brightness. The bureaucratic structures required to define and preserve these fundamental magnitudes are labyrinthine, and one could be forgiven for imagining that the elegant villa in the Parisian outskirts is the setting for a Kafka novel.

Universal standards of measurement are useful only insofar as they allow us to measure other things that are deemed to be valuable in some way. While science is near the top of the list – we cannot think of physics, chemistry, or biology without accurately measuring matter and energy, elements and compounds, or cells and genes – so too is trade. Commercial enterprise is nothing without precise measurement and shared methods of equivalence. For example, how do I know how much merchandise I am buying if not by a predetermined weight or length? Moreover, trade is based on the ultimate universal measure: money. Cold hard cash renders commensurate almost everything we can imagine, from apples and pears and tables and chairs to factory workers and nursemaids and rocket ships and rollercoasters.

Measurement, in other words, is a process of bringing disparate things under the same abstract rubric.

Beyond measure
Nick Butler, Helen Delaney, Emilie Hesselbo and Sverre Spoelstra

http://www.ephemerajournal.org/