RAILWAY STANDARDIZATION
You wouldn't think that standardizing the width of railways
could inflame the passions of anyone who doesn't wear an
engineer's hat to bed. Not so.
As we discover in
"A long, arduous march toward standardization" by
Achsah Nesmith at the
ASME History and Heritage Center:
One of the first serious efforts to bring uniformity to Northern rail gauges in 1853 resulted in bloody riots in
places like Erie, Pennsylvania. As a junction point where three different widths of railroad met, Erie citizens
stood to lose hundreds of jobs created by the need to load and unload, as well as jack up, all the arriving can in
order to change their wheels. With so much well-paid work to lose, city officials refused to grant the railroads
the right to close streets and bridges while the track-width changes were made, and the governor of
Pennsylvania backed them. Families and even church congregations split into factions over the issue. At one
point, a mob of women took sledgehammers and were tearing up the various tracks until federal marshals moved
in.
So much for dat ol' time religion keeping folks more well-behaved
in the good ol' days. One can easily imagine the preachers in
those varied congregations each preaching sermons - and
finding Biblical justification - about why God favors one railway
gauge over another.
Further attempts to standardize railway gauges across the U.S.
proved more successful and, in one case, a considerable
feat of engineering and cooperation.
That the railway gauge needed to be standardized nationwide
was not an issue - the only real question was what gauge to
choose. The south had thousands of miles of track with a
5' gauge, while the north used either the (interchangeable)
4' 8.5" or 4' 9" gauge (mostly the latter).
Given the results of the war just 20 years earlier, it should be
no surprise who changed what to what, and therein lies the
still-astounding feat.
To put it succinctly, on June 1 and 2, 1886, over 11,000
miles of railroad tracks spread all over the south (from Virginia
to Florida to Texas) were converted from 5' gauge to
4' 9" gauge. You read that correctly: 11,000 miles of track
were adjusted in just 2 days in what the article calls
"one of the most dramatic instances of mass standardization
that ever took place."
The article documents other examples of standardization in
U.S. history, starting with the hiring of a Swiss-born
metrologist (that's the name for scientist who studies measurement
and not a misspelling of the name for a scientist who studies the
weather, by the way) in 1830 to standardize the U.S. system of
weights and measures.
Hassler requested the standards used by customhouses around
the U.S. and, when he found that most had none, established the
standards himself. For instance, he based the length standard of
the yard on two marks on an 82-inch bar crafted by an English
instrument maker. As zealous as Hassler was with his job, he
was about 20 years away from necessity taking over to finish
the job for him. At his death in 1834, only a third of the states had
adopted his system. It took the rapid rise of industrialization and its
concomitant demands for standards to make the adoption of his
standards nationwide by 1856.
A National Bureau of Standards was established by Congress
in 1901 to carry on with the task begun by Hassler.
The name was changed in 1988 to
National Institute of Standards and Technology, the site
for which rewards casual or even non-casual browsing, even
offering up a nifty
software package or three in various places.
posted by Steven Baum
4/14/2000 01:50:44 PM |
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