Database showing a lot of reviews of Adlers book....
Nat
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#1
The Washington Post
October 20, 2002, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. T10; SCIENCE
LENGTH: 1885 words
HEADLINE: Taking new measures, understanding fat, stalking symbiogenesis --
and a genome's view of human history.
BYLINE: Science
BODY:
In The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That
Transformed the World (Free Press, $ 27), Ken Alder recounts the geodetic
expedition to establish the meter as a universal measure based on the
circumference of the globe. The tale begins with French astronomers
Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Pierre-Francois-Andre Mechain, who
painstakingly set out to measure the meridian between Dunkerque and
Barcelona. Alder, a professor of history at Northwestern University,
immersed himself in just about every detail of Delambre and Mechain's
mission, which Louis XVI commissioned just prior to the onset of the French
Revolution. His careful narrative reconstruction of the journeys of the two
savants -- as scientists of the period were called -- would be remarkable in
any book. But they pale in comparison to Alder's real prize: the revelation
of a 200-year-old secret. Inspired by what he says are clues in Delambre's
seminal book on the metric system -- published after Mechain's death --
Alder unearthed evidence from long-sealed archives indicating that because
of an error made by Mechain and covered up by Delambre, the unit that has
become the worldwide standard of measure is actually wrong. "The meter was
flawed," Alder writes, "because the expedition's governing premise was
flawed -- the premise that the French sector of the meridian measured by
Delambre and Mechain in 1792-99 could be considered representative of the
world's shape as a whole. Later scientific progress had falsified the meter.
. . . Yet in spite of this, Delambre and Mechain's epic mission succeeded --
not because it had produced accurate results, but because it was epic."
Epic in its own way, The Measure of All Things is no less a success.
-- Gregory Mott
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#2
2002 The Spectator Limited
The Spectator
October 19, 2002
SECTION: Pg. 57
LENGTH: 1097 words
HEADLINE: How the metre became master;
Books
BYLINE: Douglas Johnson
BODY:
THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS by Ken Alder Little, Brown, GBP 15.99, pp. 466,
ISBN 0316859893
When did the French Revolution begin? Many dates are suggested, but one that
seems reasonable is 8 August 1788. It was then that the King announced the
summoning of the Estates-General. Deputies to this institution were elected
during March and April 1789 and the elections were accompanied by the
preparation of lists of grievances (the cahiers de doleances).
Ken Alder calls our attention to these choruses of complaint and tells us
that thousands of them uttered a united call: 'one law, one king, one weight
and one measure'. From the Paris region came the demand that France be
governed 'by a single set of weights and measures'. For a long time, there
had been those who sought to reform a system whereby measures varied from
province to province, from town to town, from parish to parish. Royal
administrators, the army, the Encyclopaedia, all had inveighed against this
great confusion. The Revolution, whether it saw itself as creating a unified
state or whether it thought of peace spreading from France across the whole
world, believed in a uniformity that would coincide with fraternity.
The story that is told by Ken Alder, a historian of science who teaches at
the Northwestern University in Illinois, is that of a remarkable attempt,
during some of the most dramatic years of the Revolution (1792 to 1799), to
establish the metric system in France and to get it adopted in Europe. It
concerned two astronomers, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and
Pierre-Francois-Andre Mechain. They were given the task of measuring the
world by surveying the French meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona and thereby
determining a unit of length based on this measurement. This would be the
metre, one ten-millionth of the distance from pole to equator. In practical
terms, a uniform system of measures would facilitate the free movement of
grain. In ideological terms, since the earth belonged to all mankind, the
metre would symbolise the brotherhood of man.
Both men came from poor backgrounds and had, by chance, encountered France's
greatest astronomer, Lalande. Mechain, who was from Picardy, born in 1744,
had collected certain astronomical instruments that he had been forced to
sell, thereby arousing Lalande's interest. He was given work studying
coastlines and discovering comets. He became a member of the Academie des
Sciences, was appointed to the Paris Observatory and, during 1787 and 1788,
took part in a lengthy exercise comparing the Greenwich and Paris
Observatories.
Delambre, who was from Amiens, born in 1749, earned a living in Paris by
teaching sons of the elite while educating himself.
He attended Lalande's lectures at the College Royal and was encouraged by
him to study mathematics and astronomy. In February 1792, he was elected to
the Academie des Sciences, and when certain leading astronomers refused to
take part in the meridian mission on 5 May, Delambre was appointed. Mechain
was to take the area south of Paris and go to Spain.
Delambre was to go north. They practised the science of geodesy, which
measures the size and shape of the earth. They used the method of
triangulation, establishing a set of triangles where they knew all the
angles and where every two triangles shared at least one side. Hence they
could calculate the lengths of all the sides.
Ken Alder tells the story of the two men at work. This is a straightforward
and clear narrative of what happened. But an enormous amount of research has
gone into this book. French national and departmental archives along with
the archives of the Observatoire and the Academie des Sciences are listed
along with certain Delambre papers that are in Utah and California, while
Mechain sources exist in Paris and Copenhagen. Parts of the narrative raise
important questions. Should Delambre have tried to conceal certain mistakes
made by Mechain that he discovered in his colleague's notes after his death
in 1804?
And, in any case, what is a mistake in scientific terms? Alder's approach to
his subject is correct. This is the story of one of the most important
moments in the applied science of the 18th century.
Many disasters occurred, whether it was bad weather making surveying
impossible, Mechain's accident with a recently invented water-pump, or the
hostility of local populations to unknown men arriving in their midst with
mysterious instruments.
The authorities did not help. Church spires that would have been ideal for
surveying were destroyed or transformed by cast-iron liberty bonnets; France
and Spain went to war; in December 1793, the Committee of Public Safety
dismissed Delambre because he was not endowed with republican virtues or
with abhorrence of kings; and time was wasted until a General Calon
relaunched the measurement of the meridian and re-appointed Delambre.
Nor was Napoleon always helpful. As the most junior member of the Academie
des Sciences, he admired Delambre and took part in what was perhaps the
first international scientific meeting, discussing the metric system, in
1798. In September 1801, he made the metric system obligatory throughout
France. But in 1812 he rescinded the metric system and spoke scornfully of
those who had tried to foist it on France and other countries. (Alder
presents some evidence suggesting that Napoleon could not think in terms of
the new units. ) This was the problem. No one was prepared to give up their
traditional measurements and their particular ways of doing things. It was
not only ignorant peasants, not only cunning tradesmen who feared the
opening up of markets. It was also the educated citizens, whether officials,
military men or physicians.
And the French had been subjected to many changes. Alder tells the story of
a woman protester (a story that might interest today's English anti-metric
campaigners). She complained to a judge, but she found that she had to call
him 'Citizen'.
She could not explain what had happened to her on a Sunday, in a week, in
April, because none of these words existed in the revolutionary calendar,
and when she said that she had bought an 'aune' or two 'ells' of cloth and
did not refer to the metre, she was expelled from court and denounced as an
aristocrat.
Mechain, a melancholy man, is remembered for his discovery of several
comets.
Delambre, a determined worker, went on to write the story of the expedition
and the history of astronomy in France. He died in 1822. A street in
Montparnasse is named after him.
LOAD-DATE: October 18, 2002
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#3
2002 New Statesman Ltd
New Statesman
September 23, 2002
LENGTH: 798 words
HEADLINE: Fetish for facts; The Measure of All Things: the seven-year
odyssey that transformed the world Ken Alder Little, Brown, 466pp, GBP15.99
ISBN 0316859893
BYLINE: Tristan Quinn
BODY:
These days, making a buck in the book business seems to be less about how
you tell it than how you sell it. Ever since the huge success of Dava
Sobel's Longitude (subtitled 'the true story of a lone genius who solved the
greatest scientific problem of his time') in the mid-1990s, the publishers
of narrative micro-history have played an absurd, inflationary game of hype.
We have been offered, for example, Nathaniel's Nutmeg ('how one man's
courage changed the course of history'), The Map That Changed the World and,
most startling of all, Mauve ('how one man invented a colour that changed
the world').
It need hardly be said that such breezy repetition of claims of
world-changing significance rather diminishes the impact. In fact, the
escalation of rhetoric contributes to some pretty bad writing, at least in
the case of Ken Alder's account of the creation of the metric system in
18th-century France. This American historian writes like a man who feels the
burden of his subtitle. In 1792, two illustrious French astro-nomers,
Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Pierre-Francois-Andre Mechain, were asked
to establish a new system of measurement by the leaders of the revolution.
Alder contends that 'our methods of measurement define who we are'. He has a
point - under the ancien regime, weights and measures varied across France,
hampering trade. But the revolution had proclaimed universal rights, so the
metre was to be a universal measure derived from nature - one-ten-millionth
of the distance from the pole to the equator.
Alder doesn't develop his thesis so much as frequently reiterate it, as he
describes how Delambre and Mechain spent seven years separately measuring
the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona. The mission fell in and out of
favour as all hell broke loose around them - bread riots, political
witch-hunts, wars. However, drawing on the personality-driven methods of
television history programmes, Alder concentrates on dramatising the
emotional trajectory of their relationship. He also indulges in some folksy
psychology along the way.
So Delambre, lacking eyelashes, was 'an observer rather than a man
observed'. Mechain, whose 'religion' was 'accuracy', had a 'mouth that
drooped towards self-doubt'. As such, it should come as little surprise that
the expedition's pursuit of precision was marred by Mechain himself - who
slides willingly into death after guiltily covering up a critical
discrepancy in his data.
While the narrative micro-history genre relies on dazzling the reader with
previously unnoticed historical oddities, this potentially fascinating story
is deadened by long-winded exposition. Alder's knowledge of the sources is
undeniable, but he suffers from a fetish for facts. He struggles to
distinguish between the curious and telling (for example, Delambre was
denounced during the Terror for lacking an 'abhorrence of kings') and the
curious yet inconsequential (after Delambre had supervised Descartes's
reburial in 1819, Sweden sent France a skull, wrongly claiming it was the
philosopher's).
Alder and his publishers seem to think that we like our history strong on
sugary narrative, to sweeten the bitter pill of analysis. At the margins,
Alder discusses the new kind of economically liberated citizen the leaders
of the revolution hoped to unlock through the metric system. But much of the
book focuses on Mechain's feelings about his error and Delambre's shifting
view of his colleague. It is only when Alder finally explores the origins
and consequences of Mechain's error that he begins to justify his subtitle.
Delambre and Mechain were savants - Enlightenment thinkers, investigators of
a world they believed would be revealed to be perfectly constructed. Alder
argues that Mechain's error was a turning point because it forced the
savants to accept imperfection. Delambre realised that Mechain's
measurements were inevitably flawed because the natural world is flawed. And
so, writes Alder, science began the modern struggle with quantifying
uncertainty.
The author has a peculiar nostalgia for the days when it was easier to argue
that science was an unambiguous driver of progress. He describes Delambre,
perched high on the roof of the Pantheon, measuring points on the edge of
Paris. Below him the city is in turmoil, a backdrop to a luminous image of
steadfast reason. Blinded by images, Alder's method is not up to explaining
why the revolution both enabled the mission and threatened it. 'Topsy-turvy
times will flip and flip again,' he writes. Elsewhere, he admiringly quotes
Delambre himself: 'The historian owes the dead nothing but the truth.' Noble
stuff. But, ultimately, it is how you tell the truth that is at issue here.
Tristan Quinn is culture producer of BBC 2's Newsnight
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#4
LOAD-DATE: September 19, 2002
2002 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Observer
October 6, 2002
SECTION: Observer Review Pages, Pg. 16
LENGTH: 869 words
HEADLINE: Review: Books: A measure to treasure: The metre was the creation
of the French Revolution and, as this superb history reveals, people are
still losing their heads over it: The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year
Odyssey that Transformed the World by Ken Alder Little, Brown pounds 15.99,
pp466
BYLINE: ROBERT MACFARLANE
BODY:
IT WAS P.J. O'Rourke who said that 'drugs have taught an entire generation
of American kids the metric system'. Legislation certainly hasn't: the US is
one of the remaining three countries in the world - the others being Myanmar
and Liberia - which have refused to go metric. This non-conformity has
proved costly for the US in different ways. Ken Alder, at the beginning of
his magnificent book on the invention and career of the metre, relates how
in 1999 the US-funded Mars Climate Orbiter vanished into space. 'A Nasa
investigation into the satellite's failure revealed that one team of
engineers had used traditional American units, while another had used metric
units. The result was a trajectory error of 60 miles, and a Dollars
125-million disappearing act.'
The concept of the metre as a global unit of measurement emerged out of the
French Revolution, and it is in the volatile years between 1792 and 1799
that most of Alder's book is set. The ambition of the Revolution was nothing
less than the obliteration of history, and to this end the revolutionaries
abolished the Gregorian calendar and the seven-day week, re-christened the
months, and even tried to do away with the 60-minute hour. Religion, as the
mainstay of the old order, also came under fierce attack. Churches were
re-consecrated as 'Temples of Reason', and so-called 'revolutionary
marriages' were presided over, where priests and nuns were tied together
naked, and drowned. Few of these allegedly egalitarian initiatives lasted
far into the nineteenth century. By a long chalk the most durable among them
was the cre ation of the metre. In late eighteenth-century France more than
250,000 different units of weights and measures were in use. It was decided
by the think-tanks of the First Republic that the reform of the
weights-and-measures system around a single unit would streamline the
economy, improve prosperity and hasten the onset of equality and freedom.
How, though, was a measure to be found that would be sufficiently impartial
to conform to the Revolution's egalitarianism? It was decided 'to derive the
fundamental unit of this utopian world from the measure of the world
itself'.
And so in June 1792, just as the Terror was beginning to crank into its
dreadful gear, two eminent French astronomers set out in opposite directions
from Paris. Their aim was to measure the distance of the meridian arc
between Dunkirk and Barcelona: once obtained, this distance would be divided
by 10 million to give a definitive and utterly impartial length for the new
metre. Pierre Mechain travelled south to Barcelona, while Jean-Baptiste
Delambre went north to Dunkirk. The savants were to work towards each other,
reunite in the middle of France, do their sums and present the revolutionary
government with the most classless unit of measurement conceivable. The
whole business was to take them no more than a year.
As Alder shows in elegant, edifying and often witty detail, however, things
did not go according to plan. It would take seven years for the meridian to
be mapped. Along the way, Delambre and Mechain would be imprisoned, injured,
almost executed, scorched, frozen, mistaken for sorcerers and spies, fired,
reinstated, vilified, celebrated and then vilified again. For Mechain, the
task with which he had been charged would lead eventually to his death.
Somewhere near Barcelona, at the very start of his triangulations, Mechain
made a small error of computation. Once this error had entered his system,
it was impossible to eradicate it. For years the knowledge of this error
haunted Mechain - the thought that he alone had managed to falsify what was
intended to become 'the fundamental scientific value, the measure which
would for ever more serve as the foundation for all scientific and
commercial exchange'. In 1804, suffering from acute depression apparently
brought on by guilt, Mechain returned to the Valencian coast to try to atone
for his error. There he caught malaria and died.
The Measure of All Things is one of the finest narrative histories I have
ever read. It is beautifully written throughout, endlessly informative and
meticulously documented. Alder's learning seems inexhaustible: he is as
happy to talk about the geopolitical implications of Napoleon's 1798
campaign to Egypt as about the niceties of surveying or the ethics of
revolutionary utopianism. He has pored over hundreds of thousands of pages
of unedited manuscripts, most of them in French. In 2000, he cycled the
entirety of the route that Mechain and Delambre took, and en route scoured
countless local archives for traces of the astronomers' visits.
The result of this diligence, and Alder's brilliance as a writer, is a book
which thrills at every level. It is at once a historical detective story, a
marvellous demonstration of how science and its social context animate one
another, a human drama of the highest order and a parable which proves
that - as Protagoras put it 25 centuries ago - 'man is the measure of all
things'.
To order The Measure of All Things for pounds 13.99 plus p&p, call the
Observer Books Service on 0870 066 7989
education.guardian.co.uk/
littlebrown.co.uk
LOAD-DATE: October 7, 2002
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#5
2002 Kirkus Service, Inc.
Kirkus Reviews
July 1, 2002
SECTION: NONFICTION
LENGTH: 309 words
ISBN NUMBER: 0-7432-1675-X
AUTHOR: Alder, Ken
TITLE: THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error
That Transformed the World
PUBLISHER: Free Press (416 pp.) $27.00 Oct. 2002
REVIEW:
A robust work of science history and literary travel, with a dose of the
whodunit as a lagniappe. Love it, hate it, or simply use it, as most of the
world does, the metric system is with us to stay, and even the most
resistant of Americans will likely be doing his or her ciphering in grams
and centimeters some day soon. So Alder (History/Northwestern Univ.)
prophesies at points in this tangled story, which traces how the metric
system came to be. The meter, he writes, has a strange but honorable
history, bound up in the revolutionary politics of late-18th-century France
and the brilliant reformer Condorcet, who promised that this new means of
measurement would be "for all people, for all time"-and that in any event it
would replace the staggering array of 250,000 units of measurement used in
France under the monarchy. True to the spirit of the time, the astronomers
Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Pierre-Frangois-Andri Mechain set out to
prove that the length of the proposed meter was accurate, calculating it by
geodesic triangulation along a route that took the two of them, step by step
and (beg pardon) inch by inch along the length of France. The journey was
not an easy one, writes Alder, who followed it by bicycle; both Delambre and
Mechain encountered considerable difficulties in the form not only of
geophysical obstacles but also of overzealous revolutionaries who wanted,
among other things, to blow up the steeples from which the two mapped points
along the way. And somewhere a dispirited Mechain made an error in
calculation, one that he attempted to conceal, as did Delambre when
eventually he caught on. The implications remain with us, Alder observes, as
he closes a narrative marred only by occasional repetition. Will satisfy
history-of-science buffs and intellectual historians alike. Author tour
