The Story of Standards: How the World Learned to Agree

If civilisation is a house, then standardisation is its plumbing. Quietly essential, rarely admired, and only really noticed when something leaks but, what does it take to fix our leaky plumbing? The right gauge of pipe would help. A washer that fits where it's supposed to. Nuts of a standard size and thread! The word 'standard' is key here.

We live in a world built on invisible agreements. Bricks the same size, sockets that fit the same plugs, documents that print the same way in London as they do in Lisbon. It’s a triumph of order over chaos, achieved through committees, compromise, and the occasional shouting match. Yet few of us ever stop to ask how this happened. How humanity, notorious for disagreement, managed to decide what “normal” should look like.

From chaos to consensus

Before standards, there was glorious anarchy. Every craftsman, town, and kingdom had its own measures. A “foot” was essentially that. The length of some local nobleman’s foot. A “pint” in York might drown a man from Bath. Coins varied in size and weight; screws didn’t fit their holes; railway tracks met like guests at an awkward party. Trade suffered, tempers frayed, and the industrial revolution threatened to collapse under its own inconsistency.

The earliest attempts at standardisation came from rulers who realised that chaos made taxation impossible. The ancient Egyptians, as early as 3000 BCE, used granite blocks known as “royal cubit rods” to standardise the measurement of length. The Romans, obsessed with laying down roads, insisted that their empire’s milestones be identical; the ancient equivalent of a civil engineer’s specification sheet. And the Chinese, centuries ahead of everyone, standardised weights, measures, and even axle widths to ensure carts could travel the imperial roads, using the same ruts.

Still, it wasn’t until the modern era that standards became institutional rather than imperial. Medieval Europe was a patchwork of feudal fiefdoms, each with its own measures. The rise of international trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries forced merchants to invent ad-hoc conversions. (Imagine trying to invoice someone in “bushels and firkins” when they preferred “pecks and stones.”) The result was inefficiency and, most likely, much contention.

Enlightenment and the metric epiphany

Then, in the late eighteenth century, came France and its zeal for reason. During the French Revolution, everything was up for rethinking: monarchy, religion, fashion, and, crucially, measurement. The new Republic declared that units should be universal and based on nature, not nobility. Thus, the metre, one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, was born. It was elegant, scientific, and entirely impractical to verify without mounting an expedition.

Still, the metric system was a revelation. A clean, decimal-based hierarchy where everything scaled neatly by powers of ten. Other nations admired it in the same way one admires a neighbour’s tidier house. With grudging respect and no intention of copying. Britain, of course, declined to adopt it, preferring the comforting madness of inches, yards, and furlongs. The United States, perhaps out of familial loyalty, followed suit. But by the twentieth century, most of the world had conceded that ten fingers were easier to count than twelve.

Industrial revolutions and mechanical order

Standardisation truly came into its own during the nineteenth century, when the industrial revolution began producing machines faster than anyone could count. Factories needed interchangeable parts; railways needed consistent track widths (guage); telegraphs required compatible connectors. The phrase “that’ll do” could no longer sustain global commerce.

In Britain, the first great hero of standardisation was Sir Joseph Whitworth, an engineer who, in the 1840s, decided enough was enough. Every workshop had its own screw thread design, making repairs a nightmare. Whitworth proposed a uniform thread angle and pitch, a standard now immortalised as the British Standard Whitworth (BSW). It spread across the empire faster than the Empire itself. The simple act of making one screw fit in place of another turned out to be revolutionary.

Around the same time, the railway gauge wars rumbled on, quite literally. George Stephenson’s 4 ft 8½ in gauge became the de-facto British standard, while Brunel, ever the visionary contrarian, preferred his grander 7 ft ¼ in “broad gauge.” When trains couldn’t run across networks, Parliament intervened. Stephenson’s narrower gauge won. A decision that quietly determined the width of railways from Birmingham to Beijing.

From Britain to the world

Britain’s early enthusiasm for standardisation led to the founding of the British Standards Institution (BSI) in 1901. The world’s first national standards body. Its purpose was to “formulate and publish standards for British engineering and industry.” What began as a committee of engineers soon expanded into a bureaucracy of breathtaking scale and thoroughness. By 1920, the BSI had issued standards on everything from steel composition to fire hydrant spacing. The latter ensuring that every London firefighter knew precisely where to connect their hose, even in the dark! The idea spread quickly. Germany founded DIN in 1917; the United States followed with ANSI.

By mid-century, standardisation had gone global. An invisible diplomatic network emerged, ensuring that bolts, power outlets, and paper sizes could coexist peacefully, in theory at least.

The ultimate expression came in 1947 with the creation of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). A rare acronym that works in every language, given the elegant Greek root “isos,” meaning “equal.” ISO set out to harmonise national standards into international ones, producing thousands of documents that now govern everything from information security to the shape of credit cards. (If yours fits perfectly in your wallet, you can thank ISO 7810:2019 - Identification cards — Physical characteristics for that.)

The digital age: new frontiers of agreement

Standardisation didn’t stop with steel and paper. As technology advanced, the process moved into the invisible: data formats, internet protocols, and software interfaces. The very fact you can open a PDF or charge a phone without an electrical engineering degree owes itself to a web of standards committees who, against all odds, agreed on something.

Take USB, the great connector of the modern age (We will look at this in the next post). Conceived in the 1990s to unify the chaos of serial and parallel ports, it began nobly and ended, predictably, in alphabet soup. USB 1.0 begat 2.0, then 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, and USB4, each iteration accompanied by new connectors and mild confusion. The name “Universal Serial Bus” remains a sort of engineering optimism. Universal in the same way religion is? conceptually, yes; practically, no.

And yet, for all its quirks, USB embodies what standardisation does best: it hides complexity under an illusion of simplicity. Plug in, and things just work. Usually.

The philosophy of agreement

At heart, standardisation is an act of trust. A collective wager that consistency is better than chaos. It requires surrendering a little freedom (“I shall no longer make my screws just so”) in exchange for compatibility (“I can now sell them anywhere”). It is democracy in its purest technical form. The will of the many formalised in a spreadsheet.

It also reveals something oddly poetic about human beings. We are creatures who crave individuality, yet our prosperity depends on cooperation. Standardisation is how we reconcile that contradiction: by agreeing on the size of the box so that what goes inside can be endlessly creative.

Why it still matters

In a world of wireless signals and AI algorithms, it’s tempting to think we’ve moved beyond physical standards. But standardisation remains the quiet scaffolding of global life. It makes trade fairer, manufacturing safer, innovation faster and plumbing less leaky.

When your plug works in another country, when your credit card fits a reader, when your PDF opens correctly on someone else’s laptop, you’re witnessing centuries of patient, negotiated order.

And it’s far from over. New fields, from electric vehicle charging to data privacy, are already generating fresh committees, new acronyms, and heated debates over whose version of “standard” will prevail. Each will eventually produce another document, another diagram, another moment of human coordination.

In the end, standardisation is civilisation in spreadsheet form. It’s how we make peace between invention and infrastructure, between imagination and measurement. The world’s quietest miracle isn’t that we innovate, it’s that, once in a while, we can all agree on how big the plug should be.