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
2 - Meanings of Measurement and Accounts of Accuracy
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
Strictly speaking, to measure a thing of any kind is to ascertain the numerical relation between it and some magnitude of its own kind taken as a standard for comparison … Before methods of measurement can be devised, it is evident that clear conceptions must be formed of the things to be measured.
George Carey Foster, presidential address to STEE, 1881What is accuracy? The authors in one or two places speak [of] about 1/10 per cent, and in other places they hazard a guess that the ordinary switchboard instruments which they speak of might have an accuracy or a little more than that – five times, they suggest … I speak with some feeling in this respect because of the experiences we have at the Board of Trade [testing] laboratory. We have instruments sent us there that sometimes induce remarks which I am afraid the Chairman would not care to hear.
J. Rennie, discussion of paper on ‘Direct Reading Instruments for Switchboard Use’, at the IEE, 1904.Like William Thomson, George Carey Foster and his colleagues were sure that measurement furnished a reliable grasp of how the world worked. They did not need to ask searching questions about what measurement actually was nor about how measurement produced knowledge. In regard to electrical measurement, such matters were so self-evident for them that they devoted little effort to theorizing their certainties.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Morals of MeasurementAccuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice, pp. 40 - 81Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004