Today — this 86,400 seconds — is Weights and Measures Day.

Though it may sound rather geeky, the study of measurement can be a fascinating endeavor.
Humans have been measuring things since they and things existed. It helps us order our world and standardize our interactions. It allows a recognized base point from which we can launch further discoveries and advancements.

The dictionary describes “standard of measurement” as an “accepted or approved instance or example of a quantity or quality against which others are judged or measured or compared.”

Thus, all measurement involves comparison. And during the dawn of human experience, those comparisons involved the tangible and well known.

An acre denoted the amount of land a team of oxen could plow in one day. The Dutch spoke in terms of the morgen (literally, “morning”), which equaled the land tillable by one ox during the morning hours of one day. The Irish measured their fields in units of cow’s grass, the amount of grassy land that could sustain one cow.

The well-known but obsolete cubit represented the distance from the elbow to the tip of the longest finger. The yard, now standardized at 36 inches, is of uncertain origin, but may have derived from the length of a man’s stride, the girth of one’s waist or the distance from the king’s nose to his fingertip.

Such measurements were inconsistent at worst and approximate at best. Though they sufficed in an agrarian society where precision was a bothersome irrelevancy, they were wholly inadequate in an industrial age where tolerances of fractions of an inch spelled the difference between smoothly running machinery and disastrous malfunction.

So, as mankind increased its knowledge of — and ability to harness — the mechanized forces that shape the universe, the more indispensable meticulous measurement became.

Witness, for example, the definition of the meter. In 1791, a meter was defined as “one ten-millionth of the length of the meridian through Paris from pole to the equator.”

That description was refined several times until in 1983 it reached its present definition: “the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.”

And a second? That’s now defined as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom at a temperature of 0 degrees K.”

But as complicated as the science of measurement is, it all boils down to seven basic ingredients: distance, mass, time, electric charge, temperature, amount and luminous intensity. All physical measurement is based on one or a combination of these irreducible elements.

Nevertheless, humans have also demonstrated remarkable imagination in crafting measurements for the intangible, subjective and downright frivolous:

• A warhol measures fame, with one unit representing 15 minutes, following Andy Warhol’s quip, “Everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.”

• A kardashian is a unit of measure representing 72 days of marriage.

• A garn measures space sickness, after former Utah senator Jake Garn, who became exceptionally ill during an orbital flight.

• A helen is the amount of beauty sufficient to launch a thousand ships; a millihelen can launch one.

Now try your hand (also a measure of a horse’s height) at identifying what each of these strange sounding units measure.

[mlw_quizmaster quiz=3]