Bibliography

This bibliography is conceived as a map, not as an inventory: the works are few, chosen, and each opens a path. Whoever has read the book for the pleasure of the stories, whoever for the ideas, whoever to reach the technical texts, will find here his own trail for going deeper.

The social history: where it all comes from

The conceptual foundation of this book — measure as a social institution, a stake in conflicts and an attribute of power — is the masterpiece of Witold Kula [Kula 1986], written in Polish in the sixties and become, in the English translation, the text that changed the way of studying preindustrial measures: the lord’s bushel, the “justice” of the measure, the cahiers of 1789 come from there, and whoever wishes to understand why metrology is civil history before it is technical must pass through those pages. For a general panorama that crosses the millennia with a popular but informed step — from antiquity to the metric system, down to the threshold of the quantum revolution — the reference is Crease [Crease 2011], who has often been the counterpoint of this book: where Kula gives the social depth, Crease gives the breadth of the panorama.

The epics: the second and third chapters

Whoever wishes to relive the expedition of the meridian with all the romance of the details — the arrests, the bell-towers, Méchain’s coded notebooks — has at his disposal one of the finest books of the history of science of recent decades: Alder [Alder 2002], built on years of French archives, which gives the definitive reconstruction of the astronomer’s drama and restores to the whole enterprise its political depth. The affair of longitude is read in Sobel [Sobel 1995], the little classic that made Harrison famous with the general public: narratively irresistible, it is to be enjoyed knowing that later historiography has rebalanced the portrait of Maskelyne and the Board — our third chapter took both sides into account. On time as technology and institution — mechanical clocks, chronometers, railways — the overall picture remains Landes [Landes 1983]; and for the turn between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the synchronization of clocks became philosophy and then physics, the book to read is Galison [Galison 2003], who interweaves Poincaré, Einstein, cables, and patents exactly as our third chapter tried to do in miniature.

The institutions: the fourth and seventh chapters

The history of the Metre Convention, of the pavilion of Sèvres, and of the prototypes — and then of the long march toward the constants — is recounted from within by Quinn [Quinn 2011], who was director of the International Bureau: it is the institutional source par excellence, rich in documents and in details found nowhere else, from the drawing of lots of 1889 to the verification campaigns of the kilogram. For the revision of 2018–2019 the starting point is the official review written by the protagonists [Stock et al. 2019] , while the text voted at Versailles — the resolution that fixes the seven constants — is read in the original in the proceedings of the General Conference [CGPM 2018] ; the standing definitions of all the units, with their mises en pratique, stand in the official brochure of the International System [BIPM 2019] , the normative document we have now and then, in these pages, simply called “the text of the SI.”

The ideas: the fifth and sixth chapters

On the epistemological problem of measure — the circle of the thermometer, the fixed points, the iteration that climbs — the reference book is Chang [Chang 2004], a work of philosophy of science written on the living flesh of experimental history, on which our fifth chapter declaredly depends. Precision as a cultural, economic, and political value of the nineteenth century is the theme of the collection edited by Wise [di) 1995]; and the case study on the Victorian manufacture of electrical standards — the ohm as manufacture and as geopolitics — is the essay of Schaffer [Schaffer 1992], from which comes the title of our section on the “factory of ohms.” The birth of statistics from astronomy — Mayer, Boscovich, Legendre, Gauss, Laplace, Quetelet, down to Galton — has its masterly history in Stigler [Stigler 1986], the book that reconstructed the dispute of least squares and formulated, with self-irony, the law of eponymy cited in the sixth chapter.

The frontier: the eighth chapter

For the optical clocks the point of entry into the scientific literature is the great review of Ludlow and collaborators [Ludlow et al. 2015] , which covers principles, architectures, and uncertainty budgets; the experiment of the thirty-three centimetres — relativity measured over a stool’s height difference — is the famous work of Chou and colleagues [Chou et al. 2010] , of surprising legibility even for the non-specialist; and the sub-centimetre geodesy performance that opens the era of chronometric levelling is documented in McGrew and collaborators [McGrew et al. 2018] . These are research articles, not popularization: the reader who arrives at them from our eighth chapter will find in them, however, the numbers, the figures, and the bibliography for going on as far as he wishes.

The vocabulary and the practice

Two references, finally, for whoever wishes to pass from the account to the craft. The official lexicon of the discipline — the regulated meanings of measurand, traceability, uncertainty, and of the whole vocabulary this book has deliberately used in a narrative way — is fixed in the International Vocabulary of Metrology [JCGM 2012] , the document professionals call the VIM. And for the operative, methodological, and applied concepts — the procedures of calibration, the composition of uncertainties, the exercises and practical cases these pages have deliberately left out — the reference is the technical glossary of ingegnerismo.it [ingegnerismo.it] , which is the professional complement of this book: here the history of the ideas, there their daily use.