MONTHLY LETTER

The March of Standards

A process that began untold centuriesago, standardization lately has gatheredimpetus as North America converts to themetric system. Here, a look at the growthof standards and the need for them --including those we set for ourselves...

[] Every moment of every day, we live surroundedby standards. The roofs over our heads and thewalls around us are supported by beams and joistsof standard width and thickness; we wear clothingof standard sizes from our hats to our shoes.Standards govern the design and performance ofthe things we use--furniture, utilities, appli-ances, tools and vehicles. There are even standardsto monitor the cleanliness of the air we breathe.

Standards figure in our activities as well as ourenvironment. When we talk to someone, our wordsare understood only because they are standardin the sense that they mean the same to others asthey do to us. We further communicate in standardsymbols called numbers which are instantly anduniversally recognizable. We eat food that mustmeet certain standards before it may be sold. Inour work, whatever it may be, we practise stan-dard ways of doing things. We call these methodsor routines.

If standards are important to our individuallives, they are absolutely vital to our society.Without the standard of value represented bymoney, a modern economy could not exist. Withoutstandards of measurement, there would not onlybe no commerce, but no science and no industry.Without standards to guard our safety, the worldwould be a minefield of hazards. Without the stan-dards of conduct found in moral codes such as theTen Commandments, human relations would becondemned to chaos and savagery.

It might be said that society as we know it gotits start with the setting of standards. Man wasraised out of his primitive benightedness by the

ability to communicate. A standard of sorts wasforged when the people of some prehistoric tribeagreed that a sound denoting something out ofsight meant the same to all of them. They thenwent on to make rules designed to keep the peaceamong themselves- standards of behaviour, inother words.

It was an epoch-making move into enlighten-ment when the cave people first decided on stan-dards of correspondence. Their minds had to climbto a new, higher plane to conceive the abstractnotion that, say, five fingers corresponded to fivefish. By learning how to measure, they took an-other step along the road to civilization. The firstmeasuring device was probably a hand or foot,but all hands or feet would not suffice becausethey are obviously not all of equal sizes. Peopletherefore had to settle on a designated medium,such as the hand of the tribal chief.

Since the chief could not be available everytime a measurement was required, it was onlylogical to scratch out the dimensions of his handon a flat rock and keep it in a central place forready reference. Before long, no doubt, someonelaid a stick beside it and transferred the scratchesto the wood so that he could measure somethingelsewhere.

That rock was quite literally a standard- acriterion to which other measures conform and arecompared for accuracy. Records dating back almost5,000 years show the pyramid builders of ancientEgypt checking their rulers against the RoyalCubit, a measure of the Pharaoh’s arm from elbowto finger tips delineated on a piece of black marble.

By that time the practice had long been estab-lished of multiplying or subdividing the standardunit for larger or smaller measurements. TheRoyal Cubit was subdivided in a sophisticatedway into the widths of fingers and palms of hands.Man had also long since developed standards forweight and volume: standard-sized stones forweight, and urns of standard circumference anddepth to be filled with liquid, grain, etc. Like thelinear standards, these were duplicated for por-tability and subdivided for refinement.

The spread of common measuresfollowed the spread of trade

At the dawn of civilization, however, standardswere strictly localized. A foot was not the same inone village as in the next because the length ofeach depended on the size of the chiefs feet. Theprocess we now know as standardization beganwith the advent of trade in the ancient world,when people from one region found that they hadto understand the measurements used in anotherin order to do business. It soon dawned on themthat it would be easier for everyone if they adoptedmeasures that were understood and acknowledgedwherever they regularly went to trade.

By 3500 B.C., the Hittites, Assyrians, Phoeni-cians and Hebrews had all, to some extent, takenup the system of measurement developed in Baby-lon. From the shores of the Mediterranean to theIndus Valley thousands of kilometres to the east,measures of Babylonian origin which had beenadopted for trading purposes eventually foundtheir way into common local use.

The next great wave of standardization camewith the spread of the Roman Empire. Borrowingfrom Greek standards which in turn had beentaken from Egypt and Babylon, the Romans cameup with their own standard measures and im-planted them in their colonies far and wide.

The Romans made the intellectual leap fromtangible standards to conceptual ones, such aswhen they declared that a thousand two-stridepaces of five feet each equalled a mille, the fore-runner of the present mile in name only. Likemany men before them, they looked for immutablestandards in the ways of the universe. In perhapsthe most enduring act of standardization in his-

tory, Julius Caesar collaborated with the astron-omer Sosigenes to devise a reliable calendar basedon the earth’s relation to the sun and the moonin the various seasons. Although it was later re-vised to eliminate anomalies by the EmperorAugustus and Pope Gregory XIII, Caesar’s basiccalendar is still used to determine dates world-wide today.

For standards, the Dark Ageswere very dark times indeed

Besides instituting conceptual standards, theRomans extended the application of standards innew directions. They promulgated written stan-dards for the ingredients of bread and the dimen-sions of water pipes. They built a stone tramwayin Pompeii which required the width of the char-iots to be standardized with the width of the road.The Roman legions had standard drills and equip-ment, which may have accounted for much of theirmilitary success.

Standardization suffered a grave set-back withthe break-up of the Roman Empire, when Europelapsed into parochialism. The feudal lords andkings got into the habit of decreeing standardsin their domains according to whim. The lack ofbroad standards blighted trade, and the absenceof contact among traders stalled the disseminationof knowledge and helped to prolong the Dark Ages.Measurements presented a shambles. Where theRomans had one standard foot of 12 inches through-out their empire, in continental Europe in the 8thcentury there were said to be as many as 280variants of the foot.

In England the disorder was such that, whenthey came to draw up the Magna Carta in 1215,the Barons wrote in a clause demanding standardmeasures for ale, grain and cloth throughout thekingdom. A few years later a royal ordinancewas issued defining an extensive range of stan-dards and prescribing a standard unit of linearmeasurement, "the Iron Yard of Our Lord theKing". These standards were to remain more orless intact for the next 600 years, with a few

revisions and numerous additions. In the mean-time there was progress on another front whichpermitted standards to be applied more widely.The science of calibration, which grew out of themeasurement of gun barrels, came to be basedon the principle that "things which are equal tothe same thing are equal to each other". Thismeant that if a measuring device was set accur-ately against a standard, other measuring devicescould be set against it.

Still, the proliferation of English measures overthe years proved a fountain-head of confusion.It gave rise to a welter of different measures fordifferent things, which all too often had differentnumerical bases: furlongs, acres, rods, fathoms,gills, drams, grains, scruples, ounces (troy),ounces (liquid), pints (liquid), pints (dry), (short), tons (long), barrels (oil), barrels (beer).To add to the problem in North America, measuresof the same name in Canada and the UnitedStates sometimes differed. For example, a U.S.gallon is smaller than a Canadian one becausethe Americans stuck to the old liquid measure ofa Queen Anne gallon when the Imperial gallonwas proclaimed in Great Britain in 1824.

The end of pounds and yardsas standards came years ago

It was to overcome just such confusion acrossthe Channel that Revolutionary France pro-claimed the metre and the kilogram as the solestandard measures for all purposes in the late1700s. They were multiplied and subdivided inunits of 10, with decimal points replacing theawkward fractions employed for conversion in theEnglish scheme. Although a simultaneous attemptto impose a 10-hour day and a standard 30-daymonth failed, the simplicity and adaptability ofthe metric system gradually won it recognitionthe world over. In 1875, the Treaty of the Metrewas signed setting up the International Bureauof Weights and Measures at S~vres, near Paris.Then new standards for the kilogram and themetre were made. One of these--a platinum-iridium cylinder kept at S~vres -- is still the worldstandard for the kilogram. The old metal standard

for the metre has since been superseded by physics.A metre is now officially "1 650 763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton 86".

In 1893 the United States scrapped its metalstandards for the pound and the yard and re-defined them in terms of the international kilogramand metre. In 1951 Canada did likewise, somewhatinfluenced by the fact that the Canadian modelof the standard British pound in Ottawa had beenfound to deviate slightly from the original stan-dard pound. Since then, our official pounds andyards have been defined as ultra-precise fractionsof the kilogram and metre. Pounds and yardsceased to exist as standards entirely when theBritish government followed suit in 1959.

A single set of measuresaround a divergent world

In recent years, Great Britain, Canada and theUnited States have all decided to adopt the im-proved metric system known as "SI", for Syst~meInternational d’unitds. This is being done primarilyto get into step in matters of trade and technologywith virtually all the rest of the world. SI encom-passes not only weights and linear measures, buttime (for which the standard is a second), electriccurrent (an ampere), temperature (a degreeKelvin), and luminous intensity (a candela). standards for time, electric current, and luminousintensity have been in common use for many yearsin Canada, and Canadians are now learning tothink in terms of Celsius degrees, kilometres,tonnes and litres. They are already familiar withthe calculations involved in the metric systemthrough the day-to-day use of decimalized cur-rency. The metric system has long been the idiomof science in Canada. Canadians take for grantedmetric measures for such products as drugs, vit-amins and films.

The North American and British conversionto SI is standardization on the grandest scale,comparable to the global application of StandardTime thanks to the great Canadian engineer SirSandford Fleming. (See Monthly Letter, August,1978.) The establishment of a single set of mea-sures throughout this whole divergent world mustbe counted as one of the most significant advancesin history. Measurement is, however, only one of

many activities that draws its lifeblood from stan-dards. In this complex modern world they are justas crucial in other fields.

In fact, if you asked most present-day Canadianswhat standards are, they would probably thinkfirst not of standards of measurement, but of safetystandards. Many of these are imposed by law-food and drug regulations, fire and building codes,pollution controls, etc. But many more standardsare set voluntarily by the industrial and profes-sional representatives who belong to the morethan 600 standards-writing committees of theCanadian Standards Association. Meeting con-stantly to hammer out stringent standards for avast range of products, they are the people behindthe familiar label, "CSA".

That monogram might be found on anythingfrom a mobile home to an electric toothbrush.Wherever it is, it means that the product hasmeasured up to standards that have taken expertsan average of six months to formulate and write.Every CSA-approved product has been subject torigorous testing. The association’s laboratoriesput them through such paces as crashing a steelball down on the centre of a bathtub to checkfor cracking, and twisting an electrical cord upto 10,000 times.

The CSA is the largest of several Canadianorganizations which are continually at workdeveloping new and improved standards. Mostprominent among the others are Bureau de nor-malisation du Qudbec, the Canadian Gas Associa-tion, Canadian Government Specifications Board,and Underwriters’ Laboratories of Canada. Theiractivities are promoted and co-ordinated by theStandards Council of Canada. This autonomousfederal government corporation is also responsiblefor Canada’s participation in international stan-dards bodies and for encouraging standardizationin Canadian industry.

A simple illustration of how industrial stan-dardization works can be found in the case of anelectronics manufacturer which once used severaldifferent types of transistors in its products. Bysettling on one type, it was able to order greaterquantities at a considerable savings and speedup its production run.

Standardization such as this, says the SCC,leads companies to higher productivity, broadermarkets (especially internationally), more time devote to innovation, and less expensive productsfor the consumer. It should be an important na-tional objective. "Canada can ill afford the costswhich are associated with the waste of materialsand manpower resources which are associatedwith lack of appropriate standardization," an SCCbooklet declares.

But standardization is not without its criticsin Canada or elsewhere. To many it implies adegree of uniformity that clashes with the naturaltendency to assert one’s individuality. There isalways a danger that, when it extends beyond thenuts and bolts stage, it may restrict the consumer’srange of choice and inhibit the development ofimproved or more attractive products. Henry Fordwas one of the great men of technical standard-ization, whose invention of the assembly linebrought a new age of rationalization to industry.But he overreached himself when he declared (orso it is said) that you could have any colour ofFord you wanted as long as it was black.

In its proper place, however, standardizationleads to convenience and economy without uniform-ity. Shoes make a good case in point: they comein standard sizes, yet they are available in in-numerable styles and shades. Beer in Canadahas no less variety in taste for being sold, whateverthe brand, in the same interchangeable shape,size and colour of bottle. It can only help to holddown costs to consumers to ship goods in containersof standard sizes that will fit on ships, trains,aircraft or trucks.

So standardization is desirable as long as it isrecognized that people themselves can’t be stan-dardized. They can be persuaded to accept certainstandards, but they will persist in thinking andacting in their own individual way. Standardshave a prominent role to play in human affairsas criteria to live up to- standards of decency,standards of excellence, and so forth. But, likestandards in industry, these are most effective ifthey are agreed upon voluntarily and acknowl-edged as necessary by the people most concerned.