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
3 - Mercurial Trust and Resistive Measures: Rethinking the ‘Metals Controversy’, 1860–1894
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
[A]nd as the true value for the resistance of the mercury unit, as defined by Messrs. Siemens, we may take 0.961 B.A. Units, a value differing from their 1864 issue by about 0.5 per cent, and when corrected for specific gravity, by about 0.8 per cent … Now why do these differences exist? Are we not led to think from the papers written by these gentlemen, and others working in their laboratory, that the reproduction of the mercury unit is the most simple thing possible?
Augustus Matthiessen, ‘Some Remarks on the So-Called Mercury Unit’, Philosophical Magazine, 1865Professor Matthiessen and Mr Fleeming Jenkin … have attacked my proposition … in a way not hitherto customary, I think, in scientific critiques. The plan followed by these gentlemen in common does not consist in opposing the principle of the system by any reasonable grounds, but in attacking the trustworthiness of my labours.
Werner Siemens, ‘On the Question of the Unit of Electrical Resistance’, Philosophical Magazine, 1866The development of the BA's ‘absolute’ units and standards of electrical resistance from the 1860s is well documented. William Thomson and his allies eventually persuaded many others to express their electrical measurements in interrelated units of length, mass, and time through the principle of energy conservation. Nevertheless, as Schaffer rightly observes, there was nothing inevitable about the way that the BA absolute unit of resistance (later the ‘ohm’) displaced its chief rival, the Siemens’ mercury unit.
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- Information
- The Morals of MeasurementAccuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice, pp. 82 - 127Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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