Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 Moralizing Measurement: (Dis) Trust in People, Instruments, and Techniques
- 2 Meanings of Measurement and Accounts of Accuracy
- 3 Mercurial Trust and Resistive Measures: Rethinking the ‘Metals Controversy’, 1860–1894
- 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 Alternating-Current Technology
- 6 Measurement at a Distance: Fairness, Trustworthiness, and Gender in Reading the Domestic Electrical Meter
- Conclusion
- Index
6 - Measurement at a Distance: Fairness, Trustworthiness, and Gender in Reading the Domestic Electrical Meter
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 Moralizing Measurement: (Dis) Trust in People, Instruments, and Techniques
- 2 Meanings of Measurement and Accounts of Accuracy
- 3 Mercurial Trust and Resistive Measures: Rethinking the ‘Metals Controversy’, 1860–1894
- 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 Alternating-Current Technology
- 6 Measurement at a Distance: Fairness, Trustworthiness, and Gender in Reading the Domestic Electrical Meter
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Happy will be the man who succeeds in inventing a meter combining simplicity with exactness.
Willoughby Smith, Discussion at STEE, 1883By far the most important instrument of all is the meter … The enormous difference in the revenue due to inaccurate meters does not seem to be fully realised. A meter that reads 2 or 3 per cent wrong, may make all the difference between working at a loss or at a profit. It may be urged that inaccuracy does not matter, because it tends to average about right. This is, however, very doubtful … Meters which are corrected when adjusted at the same temperature, may vary very largely if one is placed in a cold cellar and the other in a warm front hall, or in a kitchen.
James Swinburne, ‘Electrical Measuring Instruments’, ICE, 1892Of all the measurement devices used in early electric-lighting projects, the domestic meter was the most commercially significant. More of them were manufactured for the constituency of domestic consumers than the ammeters produced for practising electrical engineers. Yet, as the only electrical instrument expected to operate reliably for long periods in inclement conditions far away from company surveillance, it was also the most problematic to construct and operate within the commercially useful degrees of accuracy cited by James Swinburne in the second epigraph in the opening of this chapter.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Morals of MeasurementAccuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice, pp. 219 - 262Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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