The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice
| Date: 22 April 2011, 07:42
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The Morals of Measurement is a contribution to the social histories of quantification and of electrical technology in nineteenth-century Britain, Germany, and France. It shows how the advent of commercial electrical lighting stimulated the industrialisation of electrical measurement from a skilled labour-intensive activity to a mechanised practice relying on radically new kinds of instruments. Challenging traditional accounts that focus on metrological standards, this book shows instead the centrality of trust when measurement was undertaken in an increasingly complex division of labour with manufactured hardware. Case studies demonstrate how difficult late Victorians found it to agree upon which electrical practitioners, instruments, and metals were most trustworthy and what they could hope to measure with any accuracy. Subtle ambiguities arose too over what constituted 'measurement' or 'accuracy' and thus over the respective responsibilities of humans and technologies in electrical practice. Running alongside these concerns, the themes of body, gender, and authorship feature importantly in controversies over the changing identity of the measurer. In examining how new groups of electrical experts and consumers construed the fairness of metering for domestic lighting, this work charts the early moral debates over what is now a ubiquitous technology for quantifying electricity. Accordingly readers will gain fresh insights, tinged with irony, on a period in which measurement was treated as the definitive means of gaining knowledge of the world.
• Provocative historical study of electrical instruments in the science-technology cross-over • Historical examination of the moral issues of quantification in science and technology • New approach to the history of electricity that focuses on issues of trust, morals, genders, and domestic consumption
Contents
1. Moralizing measurement: (dis) trust in the people, instruments and techniques; 2. Meanings of measurements and accounts of accuracy; 3. Mercurial trust and resistive measures: rethinking the 'metals controversy' of 1860–94; 4. Reading technologies: trust, the embodied instrument user and the visualization of current measurement; 5. Coupled problems of self-induction: the unparalleled and the unmeasurable in AC technology; 6. Measurement at a distance: fairness, trustworthiness and gender in reading the domestic electrical meter.
Reviews
'… there is no doubt that The Morals of Measurement is a timely contribution to the history, as well as the historiography, of measurement.' Science
'Gooday's analysis offers a superb historical account of how technological developments within the electrical enterprise not only stimulated new techniques of measurement, but also raised crucial questions including what a measurement actually was, who counted as the measurer, and who would be trusted n the measuring process.' The Historical Journal
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