Enough already.
For the past decade or so, the publishing industry has been gushing books about oddball niches of history.
They come with catchy, quirky titles — “Nathaniel’s Nutmeg” and such — and explore a moment in history that could be considered, however weirdly, a pivotal moment for humankind.
Most are fascinating concepts, but when all is said, done and written, do they hold up?
Consider Ken Alder’s “The Measure of All Things, or The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World.” A whopping 416 pages of small type in print, the story is laid out in exhaustive detail.
Simon & Schuster recorded a six-hour abridgment ($26 on cassette, $30 on CD, also downloadable at www.audible.com) with Brian Jennings narrating.
The gist is fascinating, and Jennings reads with a fine sense of drama. I can just see the movie version: In 1700s France, two carriages clatter out of Paris, one headed north and one south, both loaded with scientific equipment.
Inside are two astronomers intent on doing nothing less than measuring the planet — or the piece of it along the meridian between Barcelona and Dunkirk — to come up with a standard that would determine the length of the meter.
It would be one 10-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator. It would be, in a post-monarchy era, a measure for all time, for all people.
Our Global Positioning System society will find their techniques rudimentary, almost quaint. But it was based on pure geometry. If they knew the angles of a triangle and the length of one of the sides, they could determine the lengths of the others (after a few more calculations for the bending of light and other factors).
So they set up a series of measuring points along and to either side of the meridian, and measured the distance between a few of them by crawling along the ground on hands and knees, laying one ruler in front of the next, with the ends abutting.
All the while, there was a revolution going on, and a war with Spain. So often it seemed like everything was against them, from logistics to politics to even the infighting within their own elite set of savants. They’d measure from a station one year, only to come back the next and find it had collapsed or had been demolished. Or if it was still standing, they’d be denied access.
Fast forward two centuries, when author Alder comes across correspondence between the two astronomers and stumbles upon a slight error one of them made. He translated all the letters from the original French and, bit by bit, discovered their amazing tale.
Interesting, to be sure. But even in the abridged version, Alder is way too exhaustive.
