The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice (review)

It may be that what is real can be measured, but morals and trust are components of measuring. Between the 1860s and 1890s, trust played an important role in the transition from labor-intensive measuring to the reading of dials. Although the telegraph and electric lighting industries were growing, it remained unclear how best to think about, measure, or use electromagnetism. Because innovation in instruments preceded theory, Graeme Gooday investigates what researchers did and how they thought about instruments. He describes debates about different ways to measure, as participants decided who could be trusted to be careful. Instrument users decided how much to trust materials and theories embodied in equipment that remained difficult to use. Gooday examines efforts to make instruments that would be accepted as measuring resistance, current, and self-induction directly. At the time, only length and mass could be measured directly. Gooday argues that trust and social systems extended measurement, not Bruno Latour’s centers of power and paper.

Gooday investigates developing trust in measurement by looking at particular people—at particular times, and in particular activities—developing measuring instruments for electricity. Different groups sought different answers at different times: the British hoped to avoid error; Germans sought to analyze it; manufacturers wanted accuracy that was good enough; and central station engineers wanted easily read instruments that provided constant measurements. In the “metals controversy” from 1860 to 1894, Werner von Siemens promoted an instrument based on mercury, and Augustus Matthiessen promoted an alloy. The debate illustrates conflicting trust in metals and personalities. Users sought instruments that were trustworthy and convenient to use for their purposes; physicists wanted flexible instruments that could be adjusted to different tasks; lighting engineers needed dials to help control stations and surges in current. According to Gooday, steam technology and mechanical stability helped resolve alternating-current paralleling problems, and thus the “battle of the systems.”

In addition, instrument makers had to develop meters that generating company managers and their customers believed were reliable and trustworthy. Managers wanted a meter that would accurately measure consumption, and consumers wanted a meter that would not allow overcharging. Meters that increased transparency for customers also increased costs and reduced reliability for producers. Gender provided another variable. Men might have been concerned with costs, but companies promoted an aesthetics of electric lighting to gain support among women. Gooday argues that the conservative views of consumers were more important to them than their interests. Thus, companies were able to draw on the older gas-meter system to persuade customers to accept meters that measured quantity of energy rather than the quantity of light that concerned them.

As if to emphasize the problems of the time in understanding electromagnetism, Gooday writes for those who already know a good deal about the history of electromagnetism. To add to that problem, he tries to send readers back and forth from chapter to chapter and from discussions to epigraphs heading chapters. Arguing as he does that customers were not passive in responding to meters, he should recognize that readers are no more passive. Nevertheless, Gooday makes clear the need to investigate instruments in order to understand the ways that different groups created enough reliable knowledge of electromagnetism to industrialize its uses.