The Morals of Measurement
The Morals of Measurement
The Morals of Measurement is a contribution to the social histories of quantification and electrical technology in nineteenth-century Britain, Germany and France. It shows how the advent of commercial electrical lighting stimulated the industrialization of electrical measurement from a skilled labour-intensive activity to a mechanized practice. Challenging traditional accounts that focus on the metrological standards used in measurement, this book shows the central importance of trust when measurement was undertaken in an increasingly complex division of labour. Alongside ambiguities about the very nature of measurement and the respective responsibilities of humans and technologies in generating error-free numbers, the book also addresses controversies over the changing identity of the measurer through the themes of body, gender and authorship. The reader will gain fresh insights into a period when measurement was widely treated as the definitive means of gaining knowledge of the world.
- Provocative historical study of electrical instruments in the science-technology cross-over
- Historical examination of the moral issues of quantification in science and technology
- New approach to the history of electricity that focuses on issues of trust, morals, genders, and domestic consumption
Reviews & endorsements
"Gooday has produced a detailed and nuanced account of late-Victorian measurement that makes quite clear how the culture of metrology was deeply embedded in Victorian culture. His skillful tracings of the netwroks of physicists, engineers, instrument makers, and consumers through which reliable, robust, and trustworthy instruments and measurements were achieved make clear just how complex and culture-laden a business measurement is." - Iwan Rhys Morus, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Product details
February 2011Paperback
9780521187565
312 pages
229 × 152 × 18 mm
0.46kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Moralizing measurement: (dis) trust in the people, instruments and techniques
- 2. Meanings of measurements and accounts of accuracy
- 3. Mercurial trust and resistive measures: rethinking the 'metals controversy' of 1860–94
- 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 AC technology
- 6. Measurement at a distance: fairness, trustworthiness and gender in reading the domestic electrical meter.
