Developing measurement standards

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it...

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In early human societies, the main needs were for standard fair measures for length, weight and volume. With those sorted, you could measure out food, drink, cloth, and most of the other products early humans wanted to trade with each other.

If the trades were to be fair, all measures had to be the same, and this meant comparing them back to a common standard that all people could reach. But even at the heights of the Roman, Mongol and Inca Empires, the fastest messenger service could only cover between a hundred and a hundred and fifty kilometres a day.

Freight carriers and ordinary folk, travelling on foot with a load, would only travel about thirty kilometres a day, or perhaps fifteen if they were travelling with stock. So copies of the standards for weight and length either had to be distributed widely, or they had to be established locally. In most cases, people just set up their own local standards.

Typically, they would use the local ruler’s body, so a digit was the width of the king’s finger, and a cubit was the distance from the king’s elbow to the tip of his longest finger.

Obviously this sort of thing makes problems: what happens if the throne is taken over by a midget? Or a giant? Obviously people needed a better standard, preferably an international one, so measurements no longer had to be given in London inches, or Paris inches.

The foot is a convenient sort of unit, and so is the inch, and even the yard has a comfortable sort of feel about it. In the end, when the French Revolutionaries did away with their monarch, they changed the units as well.

The basis, they proposed, would still be about the same as one yard, but it would be defined in a non-human, international way. It was to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator on a meridian passing through or near Paris, Dunkirk and Barcelona. (They chose that meridian, because a ten-degree length of it had just been accurately surveyed, between 1792 and 1799.)

This measurement system was known as the metric system, and it is more or less what we use today. We now call our measurement system SI (for Système Internationale), and the metre is now defined from the speed of light, now defined for all time as 299,792,458 metres per second, with the second defined by a special clock called a caesium clock.

These are standards any large laboratory in the world can reproduce whenever they want to. The standard international kilogram used to be a platinum-iridium cylinder, stored at Sèvres, near Paris, between 1889 and November 2018. On the latter date, a new standard was announced, to apply from May 2019.

The change was forced because the standard cylinder had lost about 50 micrograms over the past 130 years. Now the world will use a value of Planck’s constant. This will be 6.62607015 × 10^-34 m² kg/s, and for valid reasons, that now sets the mass of the kilogram totally.

Now back to the French Revolution: why were the French so keen on new standards? Maybe it had something to do with the three different standards of length in use in just one city, Bordeaux, in 1800. In a case like this, it would pay to shop around before you bought anything, and maybe the people of Bordeaux felt they were wasting too much time!

We certainly know that the lack of standards annoyed the nobles of Norman Britain. When they assembled to meet with King John, they placed this passage in the Magna Carta:

Throughout the kingdom there shall be standard measures of wine, ale and corn. Also there shall be a standard width of dyed cloth, russet, and halberject; namely [a width of] two ells within the selvedges. Weights [also] are to be standardised similarly.

From 1215 until now, the process of standardisation has been slow. It was only a generation ago that the United States inch (2.54005 cm) and the British inch (2.5399956 cm) were brought into line with the Canadian and Australian inch (2.54 cm).

So even where the metric system is not used, the “local” units are tied to the international metric standards, and the era of local units has almost passed. Mind you, with the loss of those units, a great deal of romance has passed away as well, but that assertion requires illustration.

Early English units for measuring liquid started with the mouthful, which was about 15 millilitres. Twice this was a jigger or handful. Two handfuls made a jack, or jackpot, and two jackpots made a gill, or jill.

When Charles I needed more money, he placed a tax on the jackpot, and reduced its size, so there would be more of them. The gill was (by its definition as two jackpots) also reduced in size, much to the annoyance of the common people.

The pail was another measure, about the size of a gill. Given that King Charles wore a crown, until he was beheaded a few years later, you may now be able to read the old rhyme about Jack and Jill with more understanding. Just one question remains unanswered: was Jack anything to do with the Jacobites, who took their name from the Latin form of James, Jacobus?

Just to finish the sequence of old liquid measures, two gills made a cup, and two cups a pint. There were two pints to the quart; and two quarts made a pottle; while twice a pottle was a gallon. The double gallon was also called a peck; the double peck was a half bushel; and obviously two half bushels made a bushel, which was eight gallons, or about 35 litres. Two bushels filled a cask; and two casks made a barrel or chaldron. Doubling the barrel gave us a hogshead of about 280 litres. 

Some of these terms are still in common use today. And even though we have largely changed over to metric measurements, there are other hangovers from the past as well. The size of the type used in a book is measured in points, with 72 points to the inch.

Wind speeds are still measured in knots (nautical miles per hour), and diamonds are weighed in carats (not to be confused with the karat, which is a measure of the purity of gold.

And you may still have inches on your feet, even if you live in a country which mostly uses metric standards. In the time of Edward I of England, the inch was defined by “three grains of barley dry and round make an inch”. To this day, the difference between a size five shoe and a size six shoe is still just one barley corn, a third of an inch!

Conservation

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it...

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This term covers the protection and preservation of the Earth’s resources (e.g. plants, animals, land, energy, minerals) or of historical artefacts (including books, paintings and monuments) for the future. The term is most widely used with reference to the environment.

Most people today think the conservation movement began with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, but conservation is far older than that. As far back as 1860, laws were introduced in Tasmania, Australia, to protect native species of bird, and extinctions in the 1600s (the aurochs in Poland, 1627, the dodo in Mauritius, some time in the 1670s) had all had an impact.

By 1680, Poland had introduced reserved forests for the European bison, or wisent, and that probably saved many other species as well. The publication of Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell in the early 1830s made people far more aware of extinction, as did the publications of Charles Darwin, who even commented about Australia’s need to preserve its wild life:

A few years since this country abounded with wild animals; but now the emu is banished to a long distance, and the kangaroo is become scarce; to both the English greyhound has been highly destructive.
—Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, 1836.

Later on, Darwin’s friend, the ornithologist John Gould said something similar:

Short-sighted indeed are the Anglo-Australians, or they would long ere this have made laws for the preservation of their highly singular, and in many cases noble indigenous animals; and doubly short-sighted are they for wishing to introduce into Australia the productions of other climes …
—John Gould (writing in 1863), quoted in A. B. Costin and H. J. Frith, Conservation, Pelican Books, 1971, 131.

As well, the British were beginning to see some of the problems of deforestation in their Indian and African settlements, and ever since then, scientists have been aware that extinction is demeaning of life.

Rachel Carson was certainly responsible for making the general public aware of some of the many problems that come from using pesticides, and she made the general public aware of the word ‘ecology’, but others had known of both the word and the more general conservation problem throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

The earliest recorded use of the word was in 1873, and the Journal of Ecology (the title is a sign that ecology had finally been noticed) was first published in 1912. In fact, there were many other people who delivered the same message, as much as forty years earlier, but Rachel Carson did it better.

When she wrote, Carson was much more forceful in her care and compassion, and more poetic in her writing, so she drew people’s attention more effectively to what was happening. As well, there were many more people around, and many more chemicals. The time was right.

The impact was greater because pollution was increasing very fast, and killing people all over the world. In some parts of the world, pesticide pollution is still on the increase. More to the point, like Charles Darwin, Carson offered a huge range of examples.

In the most general terms, pollution happens when something is released into the environment of a living thing, to the harm of that living thing. Plants need phosphates and nitrates to grow, but if they get too much phosphate or nitrate, the plants can be killed.

Once the harm starts, helpful fertiliser becomes pollution. The phosphates and nitrates which you put on your garden or farm are not pollution. Not, that is, until they wash off into a neighbouring creek, and start poisoning the algae in the creek.

Faecal pollution of the Australian bush by dogs is a problem: because most bush plants have adapted to low levels of phosphorus and nitrogen, and the contamination allows weeds which otherwise would be starved out to gain a toehold.

So the best thing that conservationists can do is to seek strategies which maintain the balances of nature, to ensure that the various extremes of human exploitation are kept under control, and to ensure that biodiversity and genetic diversity are not threatened too drastically.

In the earth sciences and agriculture, conservation is more concerned with management of resources such as water, and with manipulation of the environment to provide convenient circumstances.

For example, a scheme was seriously put forward at one stage to use nuclear explosives to cut a channel from the sea to the usually dry Lake Eyre in South Australia, the aim being to increase evaporation and hence increase the rainfall in the area.

Flying over Lake Eyre, look for pelicans in the lower left quadrant.

This would have needed to be a large channel, as the total drop from the sea to Lake Eyre is only about 10 metres, but the increased rainfall would undoubtedly have an impact on the flora and fauna around the lake, and also on the pelicans which reproduce there when the lake fills with water from rain falling in Queensland. There would also be long-term problems with the salt left behind by the evaporating sea water, which would also impact on other species in the lake and surrounding areas.

Crooked Mick goes to war

This marks a turn-around, because Stewart the Sandgroper nudged me at just the right time, so I pulled this (and the other 85,000 words that go with it) off the back burner, and I am now pitching it to publishers. Remember, this is part of something far bigger.

My mate, Baron Munchausen, asked me why there were no women in the story, and I assured him that there were women on the Speeewah. He says I have to prove it, so I told him about Smiling Annie's Snake Circus.

This tale, apparently written by a thumbnail dipped in tar, was in among Cruciform’s papers, stuck to the bottom of one of the tin boxes. It is in plain English, but clearly escaped the eyes of the security people who vetted the papers. This single plain English account confirms what Cruciform’s coded notebooks tell us, that Mick and Cruciform were working together during the war.

Crooked Mick was quite old when World War I broke out, so he had to dye his hair in order to join up. He joined the Light Horse, but kept on breaking the horses he was given, and the army wouldn’t let him bring in his own horse. He even broke a few heavy horses they let him try, but he was so strong, they asked him to be their farrier, and he agreed, knowing that once he got to the front he could do some good.

When the Brass decided to send the Light Horse to invade Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, the lads had to leave their horses behind, so Mick should have stayed in Egypt with the horses, but he hid in the hold until it was too late to send him back. Then when two of the motorboats that were supposed to tow the troops to shore broke down, Mick jumped into the water and swam to the beach, towing five longboats.

That was how he came to be one of the first ashore when the ANZAC troops landed. Once across the beach, Mick set to work digging trenches and tunnelling under the enemy’s trenches, but unfortunately, he was soon being given orders by an English officer who wasn’t very bright.

“Dig there”, the Pommy would say, pointing at the ground, and Mick would take off in a tunnel going north, never stopping to question the order he was given. You can still see some of these tunnels: they went under the enemy lines and mostly came out on the opposite shore of the peninsula. If the Poms had paid attention, they could’ve gone through those tunnels and attacked the enemy from the rear.

After a while, Mick realised that this digging wasn’t achieving anything, so he started doing things his mates thought might be useful for the war effort. One of his best tricks was throwing dead donkeys with devastating accuracy at the Turkish officers, in their bunkers, half a mile behind the lines.

The result was that their high command promptly told the Turkish soldiers to stop shooting at Simpson and his donkeys, because every dead donkey was being used to wipe out some of the Top Brass. After that time, it was only those Turks who hated officers who fired at Simpson’s donkeys.

Mick dug most of the trenches for our blokes, and chucked all his spoil into the Turks’ trenches for good measure, which got the Turks really cranky, and then he found out about jam tin bombs. That got the Turks seriously upset, because Mick could throw further than they could, and he used all his cricketing skills to drop them into a trench every time. These jam tins had a fuse, the explosive out of twenty bullets, and any old scrap iron or rocks that came to hand. Somebody told me he also used nitrogum, and that we’re not supposed to mention that, but I will.

Mick might have won the war for us, if he’d been allowed, but the Poms kept being stupid. The Turks brought in this big field piece, just to try and get him, and Mick and his mates had no ammo left, as they’d used it all to make jam tin bombs. All they had was a pile of lead bullets from the cartridges. So Mick opens fire with those, against the field gun.

I know, of course, you can’t shoot bits of lead. You need the stuff that goes bang, and that was all used up, but Mick wasn’t shooting the bullets, he was throwing them.

Now you might say that still wouldn’t do much against a field gun, but that’s if you fight fair, as the Poms call it. Mick was belting the bullets down the barrel of that field gun so hard that they wedged at the far end. That made a sort of blockage so the next time the Turks fired the gun, it jammed the round in the barrel and the gun blew up. Our blokes thought it was a great joke, and started collecting more ammo so Mick could spike the other guns. That was when the Poms bought into it.

Some Pommy brass hat said Mick’s activities were unsporting, because the guns were sitting targets. Anyhow, one of our blokes decked him, and Mick said he’d better stop then and there, or some of the diggers’d get into trouble. So Mick dug through quietly into the Turks’ trenches and dumped the unconscious officer there, then backfilled the tunnel, but the Turks were fussy.

A discerning Turkish soldier called Mehmet thought this was no better than littering, and he brought the officer back across No Man’s Land and dropped him on our side. The Turks thought this was so funny, they erected a statue to commemorate it, but in the 1950s, there was nearly a diplomatic incident, and with the help of Lord Casey, they made up a cover story. Don’t believe it.

The Respect to Mehmetçik Memorial (Turkish: Mehmetçiğe Saygı Anıtı).

The officer was never the same again, but Mick’s company named him Puddles, and kept him as a pet. Some people reckon he later became Jacko the Hatter, on the Speewah, but Jacko seems to be a bit brighter than that officer.

One of Mick’s tunnels was later filled with explosives. There was this Australian scientist bloke called Henry Cruciform, who had made this top-secret explosive out of eucalyptus oil, called nitrogum, and they put barrels and barrels of the stuff into Mick’s tunnel, then backfilled the hole with rocks and stuff.

Once it was ready, they lit a long fuse, and went a long way back. The idea was that the explosion would cave in the Turkish trenches, but the tunnel had gone too deep into solid rock. Instead, all of the rocks that were packed into the hole got blasted out of the tunnel, and went heading off through the stratosphere in the direction of France.

Now there are lots of people who claim they shot down the Red Baron, but if you check the official histories, you will see that Manfred von Richthofen was shot down just an hour after they set off the charge in Mick’s tunnel. What’s more, if you look at the available pictures of the Red Baron’s plane, and examine the wreckage carefully, you can see jagged tears going down through the plane from above: it was Mick’s tunnel, powered by nitrogum and working like a giant gun, that really shot the Red Baron down.

Mick’s time there ended when he drove another tunnel back to the landing beach, so the Anzacs could carry food and ammunition up in safety. Just as he was about to break through the rock at the beach end, he tapped into a spring, and got soaking wet, which washed the dye out of his hair, and he stepped out into the sun with all the dye running out of his rapidly whitening hair.

The brass hats were embarrassed, and they had him sent back home so they could avoid admitting that an old man had been winning the war for them. They used the feeble excuse that he had been eating the rations for five companies — which shows how bad their accounting was, as Mick used to eat that much before he sat down to breakfast.

So in the end, Crooked Mick spent the rest of the war helping this Henry Cruciform bloke, the man who had invented the nitrogum, who was working on forms of psychological warfare. But that was after he got back to Australia: on the way home, Crooked Mick refused to give up fighting.

First there was the German torpedo that was heading for the hospital ship he was travelling on, as they were sailing across the Indian Ocean. Mick saw this torpedo coming and dived into the water, trying to stop it. He was feeling a bit weakened as he was only getting rations for five men, and he was pushed backwards by the torpedo, towards the ship.

I forgot to mention that Mick’s dog had been with him, right through the Gallipoli campaign, and had personally captured twenty Turks before the Poms interfered. They reckoned it was unsporting to point your dog at the enemy trenches and say “Fetch!”. Anyhow, Mick’s dog was there, and he jumps in to help, and between them, they flipped the torpedo over, just as it was about to hit the ship, and it went back to the German submarine, sinking it.

Well Mick was hauled back on deck, and his dog too, and the officers said they’d pretend they hadn’t seen the dog, and that Mick might even get a medal for his brave deed, but that he shouldn’t go diving in the water any more. The next day, though, there was another torpedo, and this time, Mick picked up a lifeboat, and threw it at the torpedo, destroying it. He was about to wipe out the submarine with a second smaller life boat, but he was told to stop, and the submarine got away.

The day after that, it was back again, following the ship with just its periscope showing, so Mick went down to the engine room and borrowed a few spare bits of ironmongery and chucked them at the periscope. He missed the first two throws, but the third shot was with a fly wheel that had a crack in it, and he threw it like a discus.

The fly wheel skipped over the surface and ripped off the periscope, which left a big hole that flooded the submarine and forcing it to the surface, where it was captured by the frigate that was convoying them. Mick was treated like a hero, and given a free run of the galley, which is what they call a kitchen on a ship.

They were close to Fremantle in Western Australia when a third submarine tried to have a go at sinking them, and strictly against orders, Mick dived in once more, pulled faces down the periscope, which made them surface to see what was wrong, and then he threw all of the crew overboard, ripped four plates off the hull to sink the submarine, and swam back to the ship, leaving his dog to round up the prisoners and bring them in.

He might have got away with disobeying orders, but the ship was still going full ahead when he caught up with her, and as he approached the stern, his head came in contact with the ship’s screw, which shattered, leaving the ship stranded off the coast with no form of propulsion. “There’ll be no more going into the galley for you, you one-man galley plunderer!” bristled the captain, who had just realised that not only were they stranded, but that Mick had eaten just about all the food. Anyhow, Mick just grinned, and said that was the answer.

He went down to the engine room, kicked one of the riveted steel plates off each of the ship’s sides, and used two oars, made from the lengths of steel rail the ship was carrying as deck cargo, lashed on the steel plates to make oars and rowed the ship in against the tide.

So in the end, the captain agreed to let bygones be bygones, and they hushed the whole matter up, so Mick wouldn’t get into trouble for disobeying orders. Mind you, they say that scientist bloke Cruciform was on board, and he used his influence to make sure Mick’s name was kept out of the papers by telling Billy Hughes to send out a D notice.

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This story and the related ones all have the tag Crooked Mick on them. Use that to find the rest.

The end of the Great Auks

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it...

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After a set of Icelandic islands called the Geirfuglasker Skerries were submerged by volcanic activity in 1830, there was just one home left for the Great Auks, on the island of Eldey, off the coast of Iceland. On June 3, 1844, an expedition of 14 men went there, intent on getting specimens before all the birds died. They were sent there by an Icelandic bird collector named Carl Siemsen.

Later in the 19^th century, Symington Grieve described their raid. Although there were 14 in the party, led by a Vilhjälmur Hakonarsson, only three men actually landed on the island: Sigurör Islefsson, Ketil Ketilsson and Jón Brandsson. Grieve tells it like this, using the name Garefowl to refer to the Great Auk:

Public domain.

As the men clambered up they saw two Garefowl sitting among numberless other rock-birds (Uria troille and Alca torda) and at once gave chase. The Garefowl showed not the slightest disposition to repel the invaders, but immediately ran along under the high cliff, their heads erect, their wings somewhat extended. They uttered no cry of alarm, and moved, with their short steps, about as quickly as a man could walk. Jón [Brandsson], with outstretched arms, drove one into a corner, where he soon had it fast.

Sigurör [Islefsson] and Ketil [Ketilsson] pursued the second, and the former seized it close to the edge of the rock, here risen to a precipice some fathoms high, the water being directly below it. Ketil then returned to the sloping shelf whence the birds had started, and saw an egg lying on the lava slab, which he knew to be a Garefowl’s. He took it up but finding it broken put it down again. Whether there was not another egg is uncertain. All this took place in much less time than it takes to tell.

Vilhjälmur Hakonarsson went back to Eldey in 1846 and again in 1860 looking for Great Auks but saw none. A species had been snuffed out in the name, not of science, but of an amateur enthusiasm for a sad sort of stamp collecting, in a pale imitation of science.

Other ways to extinguish life

Large game animals with impressive pelts or horns are equally at threat, but so are smaller animals. Species can also be endangered by what we loosely call pollution, or using fancier terms, environmental degradation. Plastic bags that blow or wash into the sea, pesticides that drift away from crops, chemical fertilisers that wash into streams and rivers are just a few of the problems that animals have to contend with.

Two other causes of endangerment are habitat destruction and habitat fragmentation. Habitat destruction comes about when we take land that is carrying an ecosystem and turn it into roads, dams, farms or housing.

Nearly half of Earth’s land area has been transformed by humans. Habitat fragmentation comes about when a continuous forest is broken up into small islands with small populations.

Imagine a family of gorillas in a forest which is wiped out. In time, other gorillas will wander in, find there are no other gorillas there, and set up a new family—so long as they can reach there.

Open fields, cities, or even roads may be enough to block new gorillas from coming in. It matters not whether they were killed by disease, fire, hunting or something else: others of their species must come in to replace them, or the species goes locally extinct.

The same thing happens with every species in an ecosystem: if new animals or plants can find their way in, they eventually will, but when a pocket of rain forest is surrounded by farms, this is less likely.

The answer, say conservationists, is to set up wildlife corridors. If corridors are established, the biodiversity of small pockets can be maintained, but there is still a problem, because fewer species can be maintained in a smaller area.

Islands of less than 3000 km² are at particular risk, and there are about 40 nations with areas less than that size. In order of size, the small nations under threat (mostly islands) are Midway Island, Tokelau, Macau, Nauru, Tuvalu, Norfolk Island (an Australian territory), Bermuda, San Marino, Montserrat, Jersey, Liechtenstein, the Marshall Islands, Guernsey, Niue, St Kitts and Nevis, Maldives, Malta, Grenada, Virgin Islands, Mayotte, St Helena, Turks and Caicos, Andorra, Seychelles, Palau, Guam, St Lucia, Singapore, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Tonga, Netherlands Antilles, Sao Tome and Principe, Hong Kong, Martinique, Faroe Islands, Guadeloupe, Mauritius, Réunion, Western Samoa.

Extinction is demenaing of life.