The Values of Precision / / ed. by M. Norton Wise.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• MitwirkendeR: Alder, Ken,; Golinski, Jan,; Gooday, Graeme J. N.,; Holmes, Frederic L.,; Olesko, Kathryn M.,; Porter, Theodore M.,; Rusnock, Andrea,; Schaffer, Simon,; Sweetnam, George,; Warwick, Andrew,; Wise, M. Norton,
• HerausgeberIn: Wise, M. Norton,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2021]; ©1995
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (380 p.) :; 8 halftones 26 line illus. 8 tables

The Values of Precision examines how exactitude has come to occupy such a prominent place in Western culture. What has been the value of numerical values? Beginning with the late eighteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, the essays in this volume support the view that centralizing states--with their increasingly widespread bureaucracies for managing trade, taxation, and armies--and large-scale commercial enterprises--with their requirements for standardization and mass production--have been the major promoters of numerical precision. Taking advantage of the resources available, scientists and engineers have entered a symbiotic relationship with state and industry, which in turn has led to increasingly refined measures in ever-widening domains of the natural and social world. At the heart of this book, therefore, is an inquiry into the capacity of numbers and instruments to travel across boundaries of culture and materials. Many of the papers focus attention on disagreements about the significance and the credibility of particular sorts of measurements deployed to support particular claims, as in the measures of the population of France, the electrical resistance of copper, or the solvency of insurance companies. At the same time they display the deeply cultural character of precision values. Contributors to the volume include Ken Alder, Graeme J. N. Gooday, Jan Golinski, Frederic L. Holmes, Kathryn M. Olesko, Theodore M. Porter, Andrea Rusnock, Simon Schaffer, George Sweetnam, Andrew Warwick, and M. Norton Wise.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- THE VALUES OF PRECISION -- INTRODUCTION -- PART ONE: ENLIGHTENMENT ORIGINS -- ONE Quantification, Precision, and Accuracy: Determinations of Population in the Ancien Regime -- TWO A Revolution to Measure: The Political Economy of the Metric System in France -- THREE "The Nicety of Experiment": Precision of Measurement and Precision of Reasoning in Late Eighteenth-Century Chemistry -- FOUR Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement Part I-Traveling -- PART TWO: INDUSTRIAL CULTURES -- FIVE The Meaning of Precision: The Exact Sensibility in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany -- SIX Accurate Measurement Is an English Science -- SEVEN Precision and Trust: Early Victorian Insurance and the Politics of Calculation -- EIGHT The Images of Precision: Helmholtz and the Graphical Method in Physiology -- NINE Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement Part II-The Age of Steam and Telegraphy -- PART THREE: MASS DISTRIBUTION -- TEN The Morals of Energy Metering: Constructing and Deconstructing the Precision of the Victorian Electrical Engineer's Ammeter and Voltmeter -- ELEVEN Precision Implemented: Henry Rowland, the Concave Diffraction Grating, and the Analysis of Light -- TWELVE The Laboratory of Theory or What's Exact about the Exact Sciences -- THIRTEEN Precision: Agent of Unity and Product of Agreement Part III-"Today Precision Must be Commonplace" -- INDEX -- CONTRIBUTORS