The Story of Measurement

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2008), "The Story of Measurement", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 7, pp. 557-558. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810894112

Length, area, volume, angle, weight, value, language, time – all quantified and systematized in measuring the earth, in counting in numbers, dealing with uncertainty, examining natural objects and processes from atoms to radioactivity, designing satellites and monitoring tsunamis, analysing verse metres and codes and library classifications and the human genome, and in producing calendars and censuses and economics. Andrew Robinson has brought all these ideas and applications together in a readable and highly useful reference book mainly for the school/college library and reference use there and for the general reader.

In the style of Dorling Kindersley fact books for young people, The Story of Measurement is a thematic encyclopedia with information, brightly illustrated, on each page or double‐page. The list of contents flags things to come and an index helps pin things down throughout the book. It was once said that “if we can measure, we can manage”, or at least make sense of our environment, and, historically this is very true. Above all in science and technology do we see the importance of analysis and measurement, as a quick thought about thermometers and drug tests, radio frequencies and internet protocols demonstrate. Yet for all the trust we place in numbers we are also sceptical about them – statistics in particular, particularly if they are connected to politics. It is easy too to forget the role of creativity and insight in science, which is by no means measurement alone.

There are facts here that will satisfy many personal inquiries, many project teasers that arise in classroom and library research, and that fascinate in the Guinness Book of Records sense as well. Like when metrication was introduced in Europe, when stars started being catalogued, when the seismograph and electronic calculators were invented, and when the human genome was successfully sequenced. Robinson is an inspired and inspiring mediator of knowledge, as earlier books like The Story of Writing and a biography of Michael Ventris (who deciphered Linear B) show. There are three sections – the meaning of measuring (going metric, numbers, units of weight and density, of money and value, and instruments like barometers and techniques like using microscopes); measuring nature (atoms and the periodic table, acidity, volume and pressure and radiation, surveying and geology, the planets and black holes); and measuring man (language, writing, computers, music, the human genome, calories and air quality, time zones and opinion polls).

Typical entries (in this it is like an encyclopedia) include weather and atmosphere, which shows wind currents around the Earth, the layers of the atmosphere, Beaufort wind speeds, and cloud types, with useful illustrations); semaphore and Morse code, which shows how early telegraph systems used forms of code and the underlying principles of Morse code; and earthquakes, which shows the growth of scientific study, discusses how they are measured on the Richter scale and what energy is released. Main text and shoulder notes/captions provide a wealth of handy information – how ISBNs are calculated, musical keys and their Hertz frequencies, Moon measurements, the spectral band in radiation, comparing different schemes of temperature, why we went metric, blood types, calculating the body mass index, and how zip codes in the US work. A useful list of further reading is also provided. Librarians and teachers thinking of purchasing this book will find it competitively and reasonably priced and may well want to add it to their all‐purpose reference shelves in busy libraries. It will be a useful resource across the curriculum.