Anyone who doubts the romance and history to be found in a meter stick will find this book a revelation. As Crease notes, the human body is the first and oldest measuring device in the world; for ...

The kilogram — anywhere in the world, for any purpose — is based on the exact weight of a golf-ball-sized chunk of platinum and iridium stored under three glass bell jars in a vault in an ornate ...

In prehistoric times, not much needed to be measured. You ate what you found and lived where you could. The advent of agriculture and civilization, however, necessitated a way for people to measure ...

The proposal, conceived by a bunch of pointy-headed Parisian philosophes, sounded brilliant: A universal system of measurement, derived from decimal-based units and identified by a shared set of ...

Why is calibration important? How calibration techniques have changed over time. A timeline showing the evolution of calibration from the beginning would have to start hundreds of years ago (Fig. 1).