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The Values of Precision. M. NORTON WISE, Ed. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995. viii, 372 pp., illus. $49.50 or L35. Princeton Workshop in the History of Science
Standardization and precision measurement have often been taken for granted by historians of science. Norton Wise should therefore be applauded for having put together this excellent collection of essays that places the topic right where it belongs, at the center of historical attention. The authors present us with an array of good case studies bearing on the emergence of precision as a cultural value and of exact measurement as a key technology from the 18th to the early 20th century. Two aspects of the history of precision, as it is told here, are particularly striking. First, technical reliability depends on the organization of people. In this respect the development of the modern laboratory is comparable to that of industries or armies, where human behavior is similarly disciplined in order to ensure the efficient use of technology. Second, the values of precision are not only technical or economic but also moral. In the 19th century, the ideal of scientific precision was embedded in Western culture. Precision, accuracy, or exactitude--connoting disinterestedness and reliability--came to be regarded as particularly characteristic of members of the professional classes.
Several authors in the present volume point out that precision is the result not only of individual technological prowess but of networks of scientists who rely on an infrastructure of workshops and bureaucracies. One example is given in George Sweetnam's essay on Henry Rowland and his famous diffraction gratings. From the 1880s to the 1940s the gratings...