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Measuring America

Measuring America
By Andro Linklater

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Measuring America is the fascinating, provocative, and eye-opening story of why America has ended up with its unique system of weights and measures—the American Customary System, unlike any other in the world—and how this has profoundly shaped our country and culture. In the process, Measuring America reveals the colossal power contained inside the acres and miles, ounces and pounds, that we use every day without ever realizing their significance.
The most urgent problem facing the newly independent United States was how to pay for the war that won the country its freedom; America’s debt was enormous. Its greatest asset was the land west of the Ohio River, but for this huge territory to be sold, it had first to be surveyed—that is, measured out and mapped. And before that could be done, a uniform set of measurements had to be chosen for the new republic. English, Scottish, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and other settlers had all brought their own systems with them (more than 100,000 different units are reckoned to have been in daily use), and in his first address to Congress, George Washington put the establishment of a single system of weights and measures immediately after a national defense and a currency as the United States’ most urgent priority.

The debate on this vital measure took place at a critical moment in the history of ideas, when the traditional, subjective view of the world was being increasingly challenged by objective, scientific reasoning. Thomas Jefferson—supported by Washington, Adams, Madison, Monroe, even Hamilton—championed the new idea of a scientific 10-based system derived from some universal constant such as time or the size of the earth. Such an alliance should have ensured a decimal America, but ranged against them was the invisible genius of Edmund Gunter, the seventeenth-century English mathematician whose twenty-two-yard surveying chain, introduced in 1607, had revolutionized land ownership in Britain and was still used by every surveyor in America—including Thomas Hutchins and his successors in charge of the land survey on the Ohio frontier.

How we ultimately gained the American Customary System—the last traditional system in the world—and how Gunter’s chain indelibly imprinted its dimensions on the land, on cities, and on our culture from coast to coast is both an exciting human and intellectual drama and one of the great untold stories in American history. At a time when the metric system may finally be unstoppable, Andro Linklater has captured the essential nature of measurement just as the Founding Fathers understood it. Sagely argued and beautifully written, Measuring America offers readers nothing less than the opportunity to see America’s history—and our democracy—in a brilliant new light.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1937342 in Books
  • Published on: 2002-11-01
  • Original language: English
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 1 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
American democracy was less a product of revolutionary war and constitutional ferment than it was of a particular way of measuring land, argues British historian Linklater in his delightful new study. Private ownership of land was a new concept in England in the 17th century, one that was grounded (so to speak) in the developing science of surveying, in particular, Edmund Gunter's simple new surveying system of squares and grids. But the idea that land could "be owned as a house or a bed or a pig was owned" was central to the new United States. Thomas Jefferson and others contended that property belonged to those who could purchase it and labor upon it. Thus, when the land west of the Ohio River was purchased by the United States, a new wave of settlers headed there with the intention of owning their own patch of land. Before the land could be sold, however, it had to be measured in roughly equal plots, and the surveyors used Gunter's method of drawing the boundaries of land in square miles. Linklater's detailed chronicle of the physical development of early America demonstrates the ways that the desire to own private property grew out of the individualism of the frontier and shaped the peculiarly American notion that the individual's right to property is both a foundation and a guarantee of democracy. 35 b&w illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Why do we use gallons, feet, and dollars and cents? How were these measurements created? Why do we not use the metric system, and why do so many cities and states have grids visible from the ground and the air? To answer those questions and more, British historian Linklater brings to life the creator of the system we use today, a rector named Edmund Gunter, along with a host of major personalities (Washington and Jefferson) and unknown or forgotten players (geographer Thomas Hutchins and geodesist Ferdinand Hassler). These figures play out against Linklater's elegantly drawn backdrops-national and international history, politics, economics, and business-to reveal how we came to measure as we do. Linklater also shows how as the United States expanded from the original Colonies to the West Coast over its first 100 years, our choice of measurement became part of the American psyche and legal system and also affected society. This expertly written and eminently enjoyable chronicle is highly recommended for history and history of science collections.
Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Make room on the library shelf for the never-before-told saga of the survey that converted the vast wilderness west of the Ohio River into a commodity marked out for government sale. In chronicling this saga, Linklater brings to life a host of compelling personalities--Edmund Gunter, the indifferent rector who gave American surveyors a revolutionary new measuring chain; Thomas Hutchins, the national geographer whose character of perfect integrity could not hide his miserable ineptitude; Ferdinand Hassler, the government appointee so monomaniacal for accuracy that he brushed snuff into his eyes to stimulate optical acuity; Joseph Dombey, the unlucky martyr who died in a Montserrat prison while trying to bring metric measures to America. But above the fascinating personalities loom huge political and economic issues. With spare lucidity, Linklater probes the conflicting pressures in the process that turned unmapped tribal lands into a plotted grid of properties for purchase, bringing much-needed revenue into the federal coffers but also setting loose a frenzy of land speculation. At the heart of this overheated process, Thomas Jefferson deployed his multifaceted genius against the greed of the speculators, heroically striving to make the unprecedented land sale foster the freedoms of democracy and the cause of progressive reform. But in Jefferson' s failure to guide America away from Gunter's traditional four-based measures toward a more rational decimal system, Linklater limns one of history's great missed opportunities. At a time when America finds itself a foot-and-pound island in a metric sea, the fascinating story of this missed opportunity holds considerable relevance for America's commercial future. Bryce Christensen
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