Measuring America

Measuring America is the fascinating, provocative, and eye-opening story of why America has ended up with its unique system of weights and measures―the American Customary System, unlike any other in the world―and how this has profoundly shaped our country and culture. In the process, Measuring America reveals the colossal power contained inside the acres and miles, ounces and pounds, that we use every day without ever realizing their significance.

The most urgent problem facing the newly independent United States was how to pay for the war that won the country its freedom; America's debt was enormous. Its greatest asset was the land west of the Ohio River, but for this huge territory to be sold, it had first to be surveyed―that is, measured out and mapped. And before that could be done, a uniform set of measurements had to be chosen for the new republic. English, Scottish, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and other settlers had all brought their own systems with them (more than 100,000 different units are reckoned to have been in daily use), and in his first address to Congress, George Washington put the establishment of a single system of weights and measures immediately after a national defense and a currency as the United States' most urgent priority.

The debate on this vital measure took place at a critical moment in the history of ideas, when the traditional, subjective view of the world was being increasingly challenged by objective, scientific reasoning. Thomas Jefferson―supported by Washington, Adams, Madison, Monroe, even Hamilton―championed the new idea of a scientific 10-based system derived from some universal constant such as time or the size of the earth. Such an alliance should have ensured a decimal America, but ranged against them was the invisible genius of Edmund Gunter, the seventeenth-century English mathematician whose twenty-two-yard surveying chain, introduced in 1607, had revolutionized land ownership in Britain and was still used by every surveyor in America―including Thomas Hutchins and his successors in charge of the land survey on the Ohio frontier.

How we ultimately gained the American Customary System―the last traditional system in the world―and how Gunter's chain indelibly imprinted its dimensions on the land, on cities, and on our culture from coast to coast is both an exciting human and intellectual drama and one of the great untold stories in American history. At a time when the metric system may finally be unstoppable, Andro Linklater has captured the essential nature of measurement just as the Founding Fathers understood it. Sagely argued and beautifully written, Measuring America offers readers nothing less than the opportunity to see America's history―and our democracy―in a brilliant new light.

Andro Linklater was born in Scotland and educated at Oxford University where he studied history. For several years he lived in the United States, working variously in politics and and the art, but returned to Britain to teach in Scotland and London. For the past twenty years he has been a full-time writer and journalist.

Andro has written extensively for a wide range of magazines and newspapers, including The Spectator, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Reader's Digest and Daily Mail. Assignments have taken him to many parts of the world including Patagonia, the South Pacific and the Arctic Circle. He has written frequently on science and technology, notably a major report on Chernobyl for the Telegraph Magazine, and an early investigation of genetic engineering for the Reader's Digest. His book reviews have appeared regularly in The Spectator, The Sunday Times and The Guardian.

Of Measuring America, he says "Like most visitors to the United States, it was the shape of the place I first fell in love with ― the spectacular grid of city blocks, the squared-off, American Gothic farms, and the long, straight, section roads that caught the imagination of Kerouac and every drive-movie director you can think of. During the time I lived there, I never questioned why this should be so, it simply seemed American. Since then, however, I have returned frequently as a visitor and each time I came back, it always struck me as utterly astonishing that such a coherent pattern could have occurred across a 3000 mile-wide continent. How did it happen? Who shaped this gigantic land? Measuring America is my attempt to answer those questions."