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

Near the beginning of this book, Graeme Gooday quotes William Thomson Lord Kelvin's famous remark to the Institution of Civil Engineers on the importance of measurement in physics: "I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind" (qtd. in Gooday 2–3). The remark captures a great deal of what has made late- Victorian physics a particular focus of attention for historians of science in recent years. Measurement, as many historians have argued, was at the heart of the new discipline of physics for Kelvin and his contemporaries. It was a way of making sure that their practices were firmly grounded in physical and social reality, that their theories made sense, and that they were themselves trustworthy exponents of nature. The careful discipline that went along with the art of measurement struck chords across Victorian culture as well. Measurement, accuracy, and precision fitted well with the gentlemanly self-discipline so valued in late-Victorian polite society. In this way, amongst others, the discipline of measurement could be presented as a way of bridging the potentially looming chasm between the dirty workshop world of the laboratory and the expectations of gentility.

As historians of science have noted, late-Victorian British physics occupied an uneasy space between industry and genteel culture. Returning to Cambridge to take up the Cavendish Professorship and organize the laboratory, James Clerk Maxwell expressed his concern that if the students' parents knew what he was about to have their sons do, they would be up in arms at the prospect. Physics, as Maxwell was all too uncomfortably aware, was tainted by the tang of the factory floor. Physics—and electricity in particular— mattered for Victorian industry and for the imperial ambition that industry fostered. Physics, according to its promoters at least, was what sustained the globe-spanning telegraph networks through which the imperial centre kept a watchful eye on its peripheries. Controlling electrical standards, argued Kelvin and Maxwell, was a way of ensuring that British domination of the electrical world continued. This was a domination that quite explicitly combined commercial with philosophical interest. Another remark by Kelvin— that when people could buy and sell electricity by the microfarad in just the same way as they bought and sold a pint of milk, they would have captured its essence—expresses succinctly the way these men thought about their science. Measurement could dominate nature, make it fit for commerce, and turn physicists into gentlemen at the same time.

In The Morals of Measurement Gooday shows just how complex the business of metrology could be in practice. Electrical measurement transgressed boundaries— between laboratories, workshops, factories, power stations, and domestic spaces. Historians and sociologists of science have often argued that what makes science successful is the capacity of its instruments to work everywhere. Gooday makes clear just how difficult was the task of making this so in late-Victorian Britain. Here he demonstrates the contingencies of using different kinds of measuring instruments in different contexts and of locating technicians who could be relied upon to operate them properly. By this showing, there certainly was no straightforward translation of laboratory instrumentation and the set of skills that underpinned it to engineers' workshops and power stations. Electrical engineers had their own robustly defended views as to what made a good measuring instrument and, more often than not, had little time for physicists' nice discriminations. Far from passively absorbing the instruments, skills, and techniques passed down from laboratories such as the Cavendish, telegraph engineers and—later—electrical power engineers developed their own metrological culture whose values did not always necessarily mesh with those of elite physics. Following the emphasis of other historians of...