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
Conclusion
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
It seems, indeed, as if the commercial requirements of the application of electricity to lighting, and other uses of every-day life, were destined to cause an advance of the practical science of electric measurement, not less important and valuable in the higher region of scientific investigation than that which, from twenty to thirty years ago, was brought about by the practical requirements of submarine telegraphy.
Sir William Thomson, ‘Electric Units of Measurement’, ICE, 1883The colourful episodes discussed in preceding pages enable us better to understand the changing and contested practices for measuring electrical performance in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In his 1883 ICE lecture, Sir William Thomson predicted that the practice of electric lighting would transform electrical-measurement techniques just as telegraphy had done since the early 1860s (Chapter 3). Chapters 4–6 of this book describe how the new technological enterprise did indeed stimulate practitioners to develop new kinds of instruments that embodied new techniques and new understandings of what constituted measurement – both in the general case and in the specific case of electrical practice. Yet in this process they brought lingering unresolved problems into the foreground about what measurement actually was, who counted as a measurer, and what and whom should be trusted or otherwise in the measurement process. Moreover, it raised awkward questions about whether accuracy was an easily identifiable and readily quantifiable attribute of a measurement.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Morals of MeasurementAccuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice, pp. 263 - 272Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004