The book was published by Kinneret Dvir. The quotes are from the publisher's website
In 1792, an expedition led by two French scientists, Delembert and Chen, set out to measure the Earth and based on this to establish the meter - which was supposed to be one millionth of the distance between the equator and the pole.
They hoped that from now on the earth would serve as a basis for measurement instead of the measurements arbitrarily determined by the rulers of each village and district.
As they turned one to the north, along the French meridian, and the other to the south, they could not imagine what obstacles and dangers they would have to face. Leaving Paris, but as a step between Delamber and the guillotine, while Machan, trapped behind enemy lines in the war against Spain, found himself in prison. Seven years passed before they returned to Paris as heroes.
However, a small mistake that Shan discovered in his calculations and that he tried to hide, finally led to his death. Mashan's death forced his colleague to choose between loyalty to his friend and science.
Ken Elder, who holds a doctorate in physics and history from Harvard University, is the author of books dealing with the combination of technology, history and economics. This book won him the 1998 Dexter Award for the best book on the history of technology.
Everything according to measure - the seven-year journey that changed the world by Ken Elder, published by Dvir, from English: Naomi Carmel, scientific advice: Yigal Fat-El, cover design: Amri Zartal, 398 pages.
The characters working in the book "Everything according to measure" and the opening of the book
the main actors
Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre (Jean-Baptiste-Joseph-Delambre) (1749-1822). Astronomer who headed the northern section of the meridian expedition in 1792-1799. Delamber ended his career as permanent secretary of the Parisian Academy of Sciences.
Pierre-Francois-Andre Mechain (1744-1804). Astronomer who headed the southern section of the Longitude Expedition in 1792-1799, with his assistant, the cartographic engineer Jean-Joseph Tranchot. He married Barbe-Therese Marjou in -1777; their eldest son Jerome-Isaac was a member of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, and their youngest son Augustin helped Mashaan on his second trip to Spain, from which he did not return.
Joseph-Jerome Lalande (1732-1807). Astronomer and philosopher in the tradition of the Enlightenment movement. He was an ardent atheist, a friend of Voltaire, "the most famous astronomer in the universe," according to his own definition, and a teacher of Delembert and of Machan.
The supporting players
Jean-Charles de Borda (Jean-Charles de Borda) (1733-1799). Former naval commander and the most important experimental physicist in France. He invented the repeating circle, the scientific device used by Delembert and Machan.
Jean-Dominique de Cassini (Jean-Dominique de Cassini), known as Cassini IV (1748-1845). The fourth in the line of directors of the observatory in Paris during the pre-revolutionary royal era (Ancien R?gime). Appointed head of the longitude expedition, but resigned in protest of the revolution.
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet (Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet) (1743-1794). The greatest optimist in the history of human progress. Served as permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences during the royal era. As a passionate revolutionary he sought the political advantages and egalitarian nature of the metric system. In 1794 he gave his life to Bel to be executed by the revolutionary police.
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827). The greatest mathematical physicist of his generation. His most important book, The Method of the World, summarizes the pinnacle of Newtonian physics in the eighteenth century. A crucial element in Laplace's theory concerns the shape of the Earth. He was one of the chief supporters of the metric system.
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794). One of the main founders of modern chemistry, and thanks to his position as a royal tax collector, also one of the richest people in France during the royal era. Although he welcomed the revolution and served as an important undercover advocate of metric reform, he was executed in 1794 for his part in the tax collection authority of the royal era.
Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833). One of the most important mathematicians in France. He was one of the founders of modern statistics using data collected by Delembert and Shannon.
Claude-Antoine Prieur-Duvernois (Claude-Antoine Prieur-Duvernois), known as Prieur de la Cote-d'Or (1763-1832). A junior military engineer who became one of France's new rulers and a member of the Committee for Public Peace. He was a central force in the drive towards the adoption of the metric system.
Etienne Lenoir (1744-1822). The first device manufacturer in France. He designed Borde's repeating circuit and the definitive platinum meter.
introduction
In June 1792, the dying days of the French monarchy, as the world began to circle around a new promise of revolutionary equality, two astronomers turned in opposite directions on an unusual mission. Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delembert, the cosmopolitan scholar, headed north from Paris, while Pierre-François-André Machen, the cautious and conscientious, went south.
Each of them left the capital in a custom-made cart, containing the most advanced scientific equipment for the time, accompanied by a skilled assistant. Their task was to measure the world, or at least a segment of the longitude starting in Dunkirk, passing through Paris and ending in Barcelona. Their hope was that all the peoples of the world would henceforth use the earth as a common standard for all. Their role was to establish the new measure, the "meter", which was set as one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator.
The meter will be eternal because it will be taken from the earth, which is also eternal. The meter will belong equally to all nations of the world, just as the earth belongs equally to all of them. As their revolutionary colleague Condorcet, the founder of the science of social mathematics and the greatest optimist in history, said, the metric system will be "for all peoples, for all times".
We often hear that science is a revolutionary force that imposes radical new ideas on human history, but science also emerges from human history and reshapes simple actions, some of which are so routine that we don't notice them. Measuring is one of our simplest operations. We speak her language every time we make a precise exchange of objects and information. But this daily occurrence makes the measurement invisible. For agreed standards to fulfill their purpose, they must act as a set of shared assumptions, as a self-evident background, based on which we reach conclusions and make distinctions.
Therefore it is not surprising that measurement seems to us self-evident and banal. However, the use of a measurement system expresses the company's ambition for fairness. This is why Libra is a common symbol of justice. In the book of Leviticus we find: "You shall not do injustice in judgment, measure, weight and sparing. Scales of righteousness, stones of righteousness, ifat of righteousness and where righteousness is for you." Our measurement methods define who we are and what is important to us.
The people who created the metric system understood this. They were the first scientific thinkers at the height of the Enlightenment, an era that elevated reason to the status of "the sole ruler of the universe". These scholars had modern faces that looked at us, and old faces that looked back, into the past. Not that their thoughts were two-faced; Their world was like this: an oppressive past restraining the future, and a utopian future waiting to be born.
The scholars were frightened by the variety of measures and weights they saw around them. In the eighteenth century there were differences in the system of measurements not only between countries, but also in content. This diversity hindered communication and commerce and hindered the rational management of the country. Furthermore, it made it difficult for scholars to compare findings with their peers. One Englishman, who toured France on the eve of the revolution, found this variety to be torture. "In France," he complained, "the endless confusion of measurements is beyond my understanding. They are different from each other not only in every district, but in every region and almost in every town..." Observers of the time estimated that in the era of the monarchy there existed in France no less than 250 thousand different units of weight and measure that bore about eight hundred names.
Instead of this confusion of measurements, the scholars envisioned a universal language of measurements, which would bring order and logic to the exchange of goods and information. It will be a rational and consistent method that will encourage its users to think about the world in a rational and consistent way.
But all the great plans of the scholars would have remained a vision had it not been for the French Revolution - the greatest utopian rupture in history - which provided them with an unexpected opportunity to shake off the shackles of convention and build a new world on standard foundations. Just as the French Revolution proclaimed universal rights for all men, the scholars argued, so it must proclaim universal virtues. And to ensure that their creation would not be seen as the work of one person or one nation, they decided to derive the basic unit from the dimensions of the world itself.
For seven years Delembert and Shan traveled the meridian to extract this one number from the curved surface of our planet. They began their journey in opposite directions and then, when they reached the ends of their arc, measured their way back towards each other in a land steeped in revolutionary agitation. Their mission brought them to the ornate tops of cathedral towers, to the summits of domed volcanoes, and very close to the guillotine. It was a remarkably organized operation for such a violent period. At every corner they encountered suspicions and disturbances.
How do you measure the ground when the world is turning under your feet? How do you establish a new order when the country is in chaos? How do you set standards when everything is about "quick as you can"? And maybe this is the right time to do it?
Finally, at the end of a seven-year journey, the two astronomers met in the southern fortress city of Carcassonne, and from there returned to Paris to present their findings to an international conference, the first international scientific gathering in the world. The results of their labor were later immortalized in an ingot of pure platinum, exactly one meter long. It was a moment of victory, proof that in the midst of social and political upheavals, science can create an iron sheep asset. The new ruler of France received the fruit of their labor and uttered a prophecy: "Conquests will come and go," declared Napoleon Bonaparte, "but this creation will stand forever."
In the last two hundred years conquests did come and go, but the goal was to learn all things. Today, the metric system is used as the common language of high-tech, of the most advanced science, of machine manufacturing, and of international trade. Previous forms of measurement retreated from the metric system that enabled the coordination of trade and the economy on a global scale. Paradoxically, the most important nation in the global economy remains the only exception to this rule.
Thomas Jefferson failed to convince the US Congress to make the United States the second nation to introduce the metric system, and so did everyone who proposed it after him. When John Quincy Adams was asked to consider whether the United States should adopt the metric system, he called it "the greatest invention since the printing press," and expected it to save more human labor than the steam engine, yet he opposed its adoption. Only in recent years have American manufacturers begun to recalibrate their equipment in metric units. Only a few Americans understand that a quiet revolution is finally taking place in their country, which is changing their way of measuring things due to the pressure of the new global economy.
It is clear that in the current situation the transformation is embarrassingly incomplete. This fact entered the American consciousness in 1999 under unfortunate circumstances, when a Mars climate satellite was lost. A NASA investigation revealed that one team of engineers used traditional American units, while a second team used metric units. The result was an error of 100 meters in the track and a loss of 125 million dollars. The revolutionary scientists created the metric system two centuries ago to avoid precisely such omissions.
One of their goals was to facilitate communication between scientists, engineers and managers. Their great ambition was to turn France - and eventually the whole world - into a free market for the exchange of goods and information. It seems that this goal is within reach today. More than 95 percent of the world's population officially uses the metric system today, and its success is considered one of the beneficial victories of globalization.
But behind the public triumph of the metric system is a long and bitter history. The basic mistake of every visionary is that everyone will want to live in the same utopia. It turns out that France was not only the first nation to invent the metric system, but also the first nation to reject it. Decades after the new system was put into use, the common people despised it and stuck to their local customs and the local economies based on them. In view of this rebellion from below, Napoleon came, on the eve of his disastrous invasion of Russia, and restored France to the Paris dimensions of the monarchy.
Now he scoffed at the world-wide ambitions of those who had previously admired him: "It wasn't enough for them to make forty million people happy," he scoffed, "they wanted to pull the entire universe after them." Only in the middle of the nineteenth century did France return to the metric system, and the use of the old measurements continued into the twentieth century. It took a great scientific effort and years of bitter conflict for the metric system to become commonplace, just as it took a revolution to give birth to the metric system.
Things could easily have turned out differently, but neither the supporters of the metric system nor its opponents suggested that at the heart of the system lies a secret error, an error that repeated itself in every other definition of the meter. Rather, in the course of my research I discovered that the only people who could know the full extent of the mistake were Delembert and Shan themselves.
Those who wish to know the origin of the metric system have one address: the official report compiled by one of the leaders of the longitude expedition, the astronomer who went north, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delembert. Delembert wrote the Base du syst?me m?trique - the basics of the metric system - to bring all the findings of the expedition "without omitting and without sorting." There is no doubt that this authoritative essay, which extends over more than two thousand pages, seems very thorough. But as thick and authoritative as we are, Foundations is a strange book that contains puzzling contradictions.
While reading, I began to feel that this is not the complete history of the meter, and that Delembert himself scattered hints about this within the text. For example, in the third part he explains that he deposited all the records of the metric calculations in the archives of the Paris Observatory in case future generations doubt the reliability of the moves that led to the results he records. The records are still there. The Paris Observatory is an impressive stone structure south of the Luxembourg Gardens in the heart of modern Paris. In the sixties of the 16th century, when Louis XIV founded the Royal Observatory and the Academy of Sciences, his aim was to combine the splendor of his royalty with the new celestial science, and also to provide his scholars with the tools they would need to compile the exact map of his kingdom here on earth .
The building is laid out perfectly along the longitudinal axis, crossing the country from north to south. Similar to France, the observatory presents two faces: from the north one could almost think it is a royal fortress, with strong stone walls protecting a gray plain of mists and gravel that stretches to the North Sea. From the south it resembles an elegant palace, with octagonal pavilions overlooking a terraced park, as if going down through an avenue of Dolev trees to the Mediterranean Sea in the distance. During the days of the monarchy, most of the most respected astronomers of France lived here. Today the site is still the preferred workplace for senior astrophysicists in the country.
The observatory archive is in the south-eastern octagon, where twenty cardboard boxes full of the documents of the longitude expedition are stored. They include thousands of pages of diaries and pieces of paper, including calculations, as well as maps, protocols, charts and formulas, seven years of calculations that produced one and only number: the length of the meter. While flipping through one of Mashan's diaries, I found an extended note written and signed by Delembert:
"I am depositing these lists here to explain why I decided to publish this version of Mashan's findings. Because I didn't tell the public what they don't need to know. I have omitted all the details that might diminish his confidence in such an important expedition, as there is no assurance that we will have the opportunity to verify them. I took care to silence anything that might even slightly alter the well-deserved reputation he had earned for his meticulous observations and calculations. "
I still remember the shock I felt reading those words. Why is there more than one version of Mashan's findings? What exactly was hidden from the public? Part of the answer is in the one cardboard box that was not deposited with the others. Delamber stored it separately, and for security locked it in a seal. That seal is now broken. There are no logs or calculations inside. But letters, dozens of letters exchanged between Delamber and Mashan, as well as letters exchanged between Delamber and Madame Mashan. Have I encountered, among all these dusty calculations, a scandal of intrigue and deceit? When I read these letters, I began to understand that I had discovered something much more interesting: the story of a scientific error and the painful choices it forced upon men and women of integrity. In the margin of Delamber's last letter to Masshan, sent from the abandoned monastery of Saint Ponce in the remote Montagnes Noir region of southern France, Delamber scribbled a final explanatory note.
Mashan asked me more than once to burn his letters, but his mental state, and the fear that one day he would rise up against me, motivated me to keep them in case I had to use them to defend myself... In any case, I thought that prudence required keeping them under seal so that they could not be opened , unless someone needs to verify the passages I posted on the basics of the metric system.
The rest of the clues to the solution of the mystery are found elsewhere, scattered not only over France and not only in the sources that Delamber kept, but also in the records of the other writers of the scholars: in Spain, Holland, Italy, Germany, Denmark, England and the United States, including a treasure trove of Delamber documents that have mysteriously disappeared Mysteries from a French archive (with cleared trash, the archivists claim) and arrived, via a London auction house, at the library of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, United States. And finally I discovered something that for many years was considered lost: Delambare's private copy of his authoritative treatise, Fundamentals of the Metric System. These volumes are now in the home of David Karpeles, a collector of rare books and manuscripts in Santa Barbara, California. There, on the title page, in his angular handwriting, Delamber wrote Napoleon's sublime prophecy: "'Conquests will come and go, but this work will stand forever,' words said by Napoleon Bonaparte to the author of Foundations." But the title page was not the only page on which the author wrote his footnotes.
These documents together reveal an impressive story. They teach that Mashan - despite his extreme caution and punctuality - made a mistake in the first years of the expedition's activity, and worse than that, when he discovered his mistake he hid it. The news of the secret error caused Mashaan anguish and pushed him to the brink of madness, and he eventually died trying to correct himself. The meter, as things turned out, has an error, an error that has been perpetuated in every other definition of its length, including its current definition, which is based on the distance that light travels in a given fraction of a second.
According to measurements made today from a satellite, the length of the longitude from the pole to the equator is 10,002,290 meters. In other words, the meter calculated by Delembert and Shan is shorter than the exact meter by approximately 0.2 millimeters, or about the thickness of two pages in this book. The deviation is indeed small, but is picked up by the sense of touch, and is large enough to cause problems in high-precision science. In this subtle difference lies the story of two people who set out in opposite directions for a great task: to measure the world, and discovered that the degree of honesty can bring them in opposite directions, like their carts. Both were men in their mid-forties. Both were born into low-class families from the province and rose to greatness thanks to their talent and amazing work ability. Both studied under the same astronomer, Jerome Leland, and were elected to the Academy of Sciences at the right time. The revolution gave them an opportunity for a one-of-a-kind achievement: a chance to sign their names on the world's unit of measure. But in the course of their seven years of travels, each of them learned to understand differently their metrical mission and the loyalty required by it. This difference will determine their fate.
This is a story of error and its meaning: how people strive for utopian perfection in their work and in their lives, and how they deal with the shortcomings that always appear on the way to its fulfillment. How do you feel when you are wrong, especially in a matter of such great importance? But despite the failure, Delembert and Shan succeeded. Thanks to their efforts they not only reformulated our knowledge of the shape of the Earth, but also our knowledge of the nature of error. During the process, the scientific error turned from a moral failure into a social problem, and forever changed the meaning of being a scientist. The results of their labor resonate far beyond the fields of science. Their influence can be traced in the globalization of the exchange of goods and services, and in the way in which ordinary people began to understand what is good for them and serves them. Eventually, even the rural France they traversed on their journey changed.
To tackle this story, I set out to recreate their journey. In 2000, when France celebrated the end of the millennium along the Meridienne Verte - an avenue of evergreen trees that stretches for about four thousand kilometers, which was supposed to mark the national longitude, although for some reason it was never planted - I set out on the winding path of Delamber and Shan , I climbed the spiers of the cathedrals and the peaks of the mountains, from which they made their measurements, and I scanned the archives in the cities of the field in search of their traces. It was my own private Tour de France. Delembert and Shan demonstrated that an intelligent application of scientific knowledge could, as Archimedes once boasted, move the world. Where they moved by cart and on foot, I rode a bicycle. After all, what is a bicycle if not a crane on wheels? A pedal lever that allows the rider to move on the surface of the world, or, and we were almost there, to move the world.
