The making of the kilogram, 1789-1799
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- When France's leading academicians—Lavoisier, Coulomb, Laplace, Condorcet and Lagrange amongst them—set about defining and then implementing a new system of weights and measures in the 1790s, they did so with gusto and pride. Their purpose was not merely to unify the country's weights and measures, but to present to the world a system of measurement that was "perfect", "taken from nature" and "in no way arbitrary". It was deemed necessary to perform fresh scientific experiments, witnessed by international observers, to determine the value of the metre and its off-shoot, the kilogram. The creators of the metric system were anticipating the day when every public measurement, whether for commercial or scientific use, would be made with the new metric measures. The expectation was wild, generated in the fervour of the French Revolution, but it did come true. At the turning of the twenty-first century, the kilogram and the metre are the scientific community's measures of mass and length respectively, and used (even if indirectly) in almost all societal circles. The history of the kilogram has played second fiddle to that of the metre. I chart here how, ten years after the French people called upon its government to deliver a single weight for the entire nation, the first kilogram prototype came to be delivered to its vault. Along the way, I examine experiments that were performed to calibrate the new weight against the old, the metrological ideals that drove the project forward and the craftsmanship with which the first kilogram prototype was fabricated from platinum. My historical research has been guided by philosophical questions. What does it take for a scientific measure to be objective? What is the difference between a calibration and an experiment? Once we know all there it to know about how to measure mass, do we know all there is to know about mass? Without fully addressing questions like these, this thesis provides a commentary relevant to topics in the foundations of measurement: the nature of experimental calibration, the naturalness of scientific measures and the significance of a measure's definition are considered here, but from the perspective of the experimental and technological history of metrology.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2013 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Riordan, Sally |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Philosophy. |
| Primary advisor | Friedman, Michael |
| Thesis advisor | Friedman, Michael |
| Thesis advisor | Ryckman, Thomas |
| Thesis advisor | Smith, George E. (George Edwin), 1938- |
| Thesis advisor | Suppes, Patrick, 1922-2014 |
| Advisor | Ryckman, Thomas |
| Advisor | Smith, George E. (George Edwin), 1938- |
| Advisor | Suppes, Patrick, 1922-2014 |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Sally Riordan. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Philosophy. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2013. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2013 by Sally Riordan
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...