Ken Alder: The Measure Of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey And Hidden Error That Transformed The World

Historian Ken Alder's The Measure Of All Things takes a seemingly mundane scientific landmark–the birth of the metric system–;and digs for scraps of drama, adventure, and intrigue. Though his book lacks the romantic punch of Dava Sobel's recent, similar bestsellers Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Alder writes smoothly and comprehensibly about a tough subject. He emphasizes the complicated personalities of the two 18th-century Frenchmen who set out to define the proper length of the meter, and their intention to supply the foundation of a new standardized system of measurement, thereby making life more equitable. In June 1792, during the early days of the French Revolution, astronomer Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre headed north from Paris while his elder colleague Pierre-François-André Méchain headed south. The two men were working together to triangulate a meridian across France, to be used to extrapolate 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. As the book's title implies, the task took seven years, during which France underwent a bloodlessly ideological class uprising that turned into a savage civil war, then culminated in the ascension of Napoleon Bonaparte. As the book's title also implies, Delambre and Méchain got their number wrong. Méchain bungled his data, then covered up his mistake by adjusting the figures to more closely match the "provisional meter" that the French Royal Academy had already adopted. Throughout the book, Alder lays out the folly of the expedition, which started with the noble belief that drafting measurements from the Earth itself would give each citizen of the world the confidence that at least one aspect of life had reason and permanence. Of course, the astronomers didn't yet know how misshapen and imperfect the planet actually is, which means they would have been better off just making up a number. As it happened, Méchain's inability to get the results he wanted drove him to an early grave, while Delambre's belated discovery of his partner's deceit turned the younger scientist more philosophical, and launched an era in which accounting for error became an important part of scientific study. Alder clearly admires Delambre and Méchain for their contributions to modern science, however inadvertent. He also writes warmly about their era, when number-crunchers were hailed as "savants"and had the ear of kings and commoners alike, and when science involved strapping on hiking boots and heading into the wild to refine the common understanding.