[Week 2] January 15 + 20 - "The slogan of the day is uniformity": The rise, fall, and rise of the metric system in revolutionary France (and elsewhere)
Section outline
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Assigned reading:Ken Alder, "A revolution to measure: The political economy of the metric system in France," in M. Norton Wise, ed., The Values of Precision (1995), 39-71.
Additional resources:
Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (1997).
Henry Hennessy, On a Uniform System of Weights, Measures, and Coins for All Nations (1858), 3–30.
Simon Schaffer, “Metrology, metrication, and Victorian values,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (1997), 438–474.
Witold Kula, Measures and Men (1986).
Martin H. Geyer, "One language for the world: The metric system, international coinage, gold standard, and the rise of internationalism, 1850-1900," in Geyer and Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (2001).
O. D. Khvolson, Metricheskaia sistema mer i vesov i ee znachenie dlia Rossii (1896). -