The Story of Standards

Just about every object, rule, and ritual in our daily lives owes something to a standard. From the guage of a railway track to the dimensions of a brick, or the plug you grudgingly wrestle with every night. All are the product of long negotiations between logic, laziness, and sheer human stubbornness. We live inside a world of agreements so ordinary we barely notice them, yet without them, nothing would quite fit (except perhaps the oddity in the image above, bless it).

This blog explores those quiet triumphs of order. How our beloved boffins measured, built, and, sometimes accidentally shaped the modern world. Each post will uncover further a world of standards: where they came from, why our experts endured lengthy committee meetings and argued about whatever they were trying to fix or improve, and why all of it still matters.

We'll uncover the world of standards and standardisation (British spelling, in spite of efforts to standardize it) and be thankful to those who allowed us to swerve all of those committee meetings.

Where would we be without standardisation?