Have you ever experienced that your printer got stuck at a piece of paper? What if that happened every time you print? This course explains the importance of technical norms to which engineers abide to, so your printer works smoothly. Imagine that there were no standards. That is not easy, even if you try. The reason is that a lot of standards are very common to us and are with us for ages. But there are also new standards, new technical agreements, that are created rapidly every day. Did you ever ask yourself how under the hood of your mobile phone, messages are sent to other phones? Society would not be like it is today, if there were no technical agreements and or protocols on how things are working. This course explains how these technical specifications come into being and thus help you and but also society at large.
History overview
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Welcome to this module on History and Standards.
This module will deal with certain aspects
over the last centuries on how standardization came into being.
So, we will go and try to find out how in
the old days up to let's say about the 20th century,
how standards have been used to measure things,
to weight things and the like.
But before we're going to do that,
it is important to repeat
how and where this module in the total context of this course will be,
and this module will deal with,
to find out how standards came into being.
So, let's go into history now,
and the overview is first of all we go back even before Christ to see how in
the ancient cultures standards have been used,
and then we will put some attention on how standard parts,
standard stuff have been used since the Industrial Revolution.
First, let's go back into ancient times;
Persia, Egypt, and even Babylon.
At those times when you were trading you wanted to know sure that when you bought,
let's say 10 kilos of wheat,
that it was indeed 10 kilos of wheat and that each time
was 10 kilos of wheat which also wanted to be sure when
you bought cotton or cloth or stuff
that needed to be measured that there was a standardized measure to use this.
For instance, a piece of the hand was at that time used,
sometime a finger or the forearm was used to measure pieces of cloth for instance,
more or less standardized.
Of course, we wanted to know at what time we were living or how much time had been spent.
So, the sun and the moon were being used as elements to find out what
the time was or what the day was and what period of the year people were.
To really see how these standardized artifacts have been used,
I will show you from the kingdom of Darius, a stone,
and this stone weighed about 60 kilos,
and this stone was used to see how much weight rice or wheat were having.
This stone weighed about 60 kilos as you can see.
Another proof of standardization was the use of carts.
We have found cart tracks all over the world,
and although the tracks are not the same,
but you can see it takes a long time to etch these tracks into rock bottom,
and because of that you can see that even carts which do not have
a real lifelong time to spend so that these tracks,
these carts were of the same measure during a long period of time.
Let's now go and see how the trading,
when trading became more important in the Mediterranean,
for instance the Venetian kingdom
had ports that they were using all over the Mediterranean,
they even had some areas that they were occupying.
They were using ships to go from one port to the other,
but in storms and on the sea and oars they broke,
pulleys went slower, sails did not work anymore,
so they had spare parts all over the Mediterranean to be able to
repair ships even if when they were not at home in Venice.
The Dutch did that in the 16th and 17th century,
they built ships that were able to transport a lot of notably wood in the beginning,
coming out of the Baltic Sea,
and so they also had their ships which was called a Fluitschip,
ships being able to be repaired all over the Baltic Sea,
all over the ports they were using to get goods from.
Then when the steam machine came in the mid of the 1850's,
when steam machine could be used for instance in textile
making when the warp and a weft could be interchanged
with each other by using a steam machine then these shuttles could
be shot into the warp and weave to make new cloth.
Having guns, they could break,
they could go broke,
so in the United States
when the Springfield company was using building muskets all over the country,
they were able to also make the broken parts,
make available all over the United States so that you could repair your musket.
At the end of the 19th century,
it became more and more clear that
using steam machines with the power vessels or the boilers as they were called in it,
sometimes they just exploded,
and they found out that that came because of the fact that there
was a wrong composition of iron and carbon.
So, this overseeing what the exact composition of the material was,
made clear that when boilers were made according to that instruction so to speak,
then they became a lot more safe.
This was the first proof of that accreditation or
confirmation agencies came about to check whether the composition,
whether the standard was being listened to, so to speak.
So, this module will give more insights into how standards came into being.
We went back a bit in time,
and for the next lecture we will go and see and try to
find out how time became standardized at the end of the 19th century.
