The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice

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Cambridge University Press, 2004 - Всего страниц: 285
The Morals of Measurement is a contribution to the social histories of quantification and of electrical technology in nineteenth-century Britain, Germany, and France. It shows how the advent of commercial electrical lighting stimulated the industrialisation of electrical measurement from a skilled labour-intensive activity to a mechanised practice relying on radically new kinds of instruments. Challenging traditional accounts that focus on metrological standards, this book shows instead the centrality of trust when measurement was undertaken in an increasingly complex division of labour with manufactured hardware. Case studies demonstrate how difficult late Victorians found it to agree upon which electrical practitioners, instruments, and metals were most trustworthy and what they could hope to measure with any accuracy. Subtle ambiguities arose too over what constituted 'measurement' or 'accuracy' and thus over the respective responsibilities of humans and technologies in electrical practice. Running alongside these concerns, the themes of body, gender, and authorship feature importantly in controversies over the changing identity of the measurer. In examining how new groups of electrical experts and consumers construed the fairness of metering for domestic lighting, this work charts the early moral debates over what is now a ubiquitous technology for quantifying electricity. Accordingly readers will gain fresh insights, tinged with irony, on a period in which measurement was treated as the definitive means of gaining knowledge of the world.

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Содержание

DisTrust in People
1
Meanings of Measurement and Accounts of Accuracy
40
Rethinking
82
Trust the Embodied
128
A Siemens electrodynamometer c 1884
134
Willoughby and Oliver Smith stand over a mirror
143
Ayrton and Perrys electric tricycle 1882
157
Ayrton Mather version of the Deprez DArsonval
163
Alternators running in parallel Amberley Road Power Station
213
Fairness Trustworthiness
219
Gas meter with three contrarotating dials 1884
228
An Edison meter opened to show the electrolytic cells 1888
235
Cross section of Ferranti DC mercurymotor meter 1895
242
At the Door or Paterfamilias and the Young Spark Punch
254
Conclusion
263
Index
273

The Unparalleled
173
James Clerk Maxwells pulley and flywheel model
187

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