;i78 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LVI, No. 14-19 



pound" for the regulation of the coinage, and 

 the "act to define and establish the units of 

 electrical measure," which became a law on 

 July 12, 1894. 



The failure of Congress to act when the 

 importance of action was especially urged by 

 Washington in a message to ithe first Congress, 

 as it was. later by Jefferson, Madison and 

 Adams, was due to the general recognition of 

 the unscientific character of the clumsy and 

 burdensome system or systems then in use in 

 the colonies (mostly derived from the then 

 very imperfect English system) and a strong 

 desire on the part of the "early fathers" (who 

 seem at this distance to have ibeen as wise as 

 they were early) to put into our weights and 

 measures the same simplicity of decimal ratio 

 that has made our system of currency the best 

 in the world. 



In the absence of congressional action many 

 of the states acted separately, establishing their 

 own standards, thus creating much confu- 

 sion. Some states took no action at all, the 

 business of exchange of commodities by weight 

 and measure being based upon units that had 

 no authority except tradition and continued 

 use. 



In the mean time important work was to be 

 done by the government itself, in which stand- 

 ards of authority and precision were i-equired. 

 By far the greater part of this, the collection 

 of revenue and the survey of the coasts and the 

 country as a whole, was under the jurisdiction 

 of the Treasury Department, and to a bureau 

 of this department, the Coast and Geodetic 

 Survey, was assigned the duty of obtaining and 

 caring for such standards of precision as could 

 be obtained in Europe. 



Among them was a ibrass bar, eighty-two 

 inches in length, made by Troughton, of Lon- 

 don, which was graduated in inches and tenths 

 with a degree of accuracy probably as high as 

 was ait that time attainable. A careful exam- 

 ination of the divisions, however, revealed a 

 considerable degree of irregularity, but it was 

 finally decided (1830) that when the tempera- 

 ture of this bar was sixty-two degrees Fahren- 

 heit the disitanee between the twenty-seventh 

 and the sixtv-third inch lines should be re- 



garded as the standard yard by all of the vari- 

 ous government ibureaus in which measures of 

 length were used. 



It is important to note that there was no 

 congressional action, no law passed, the fixing 

 of this standard being done by the secretary of 

 the treasury, on the recommendation of the 

 superintendent of the coast survey, acting in 

 the capacity of superintendent of weights and 

 measures. 



Its authoritative use, therefore, was restTict- 

 ed to operations in which the United States 

 government was concerned. At the same time, 

 as the result of the discovery of great discrep- 

 ancies among the weights and measures actu- 

 ally in use at the principal custom houses, 

 standards of mass and volume were estab- 

 lished, the validity of which was restricted in 

 the same wa\-. 



In order to reduce the confusion of standards 

 in and among the several staites, in 1836 the 

 secretary of the treasury caused a complete set 

 of all weights and measures adopted for use 

 in the collection of revenue to be delivered to 

 the governor of each state, hoping that through 

 their adoption by state legislatures a good de- 

 gree of uniformity might be secured. In many 

 eases this followed and in some instances the 

 treasury standards were accepted without legis- 

 lation. 



To recur now to the standard yard as repre- . 

 sented on the Troughton scale, and its relation 

 to the English standard: It was doubtless a 

 copy, though not an exact copy, of what had 

 been adopted by the English parliament in 

 1826 as the imperial yard of Great Britain. 

 This was a bar on which the yard was en- 

 graved, made in 1760 by a mechanician named 

 Bird and kept in the custody of the clerk of 

 the House of Commons. 



In 1834 the burning of the Parliament 

 House destroyed this and other imperial stand- 

 ards stored therein, and thus the immediate an- 

 cestor of the Troughton scale disappeared. 



It was found impossible to reproduce it with 

 any degree of accuracy Iby finding the period 

 of vibration of a pendulum as had been 

 originally provided and recourse was had to 

 several copies of it which had been made and 



