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Rulers of the Ancient World: period correct measuring tools
- legitster 2y agoThese are beautiful - but the project kind of misrepresents how ancient measurements worked. Outside of building sites in Medieval Europe it would be common for the head architect to have the outline of his hand on a sign. The idea being that even "crude" measurements like hand-widths and thumb lengths would be universally agreed upon for the project. You can see some of this at work watching documentaries of the Guédelon Castle project - you see just how little precise measurements were actually needed. A lot of tasks we are used to accomplishing through high precision measurement, they instead use clever tricks of geometry. And jigs - lots of jigs. In this way, ancient craftsmen were genius - often understanding some pretty profound principles of geometry through experience and intuition alone. Measurements, such as they existed, were always a very "local" affair. It wasn't until empires and mass manufacturing that the need for "standardized" measurements. The intelligence of the individual craftsman became less important - the ability to follow instructions became more. In a way modern measurements are a form of artificial intelligence - an automation tool.
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- JoeAltmaier 2y agoIn fact in the US it wasn't until Herbert Hoover, in his capacity as Secretary of Commerce in the 1920's, standardized everything from pipe gauges and thread counts to bedpans and light sockets. He published a government schedule which soon got adopted nationwide. It enabled a farmer in Wyoming to order parts from a manufacturer in Massachusetts and they would fit when they arrived.
- legitster 2y agoAlthough, it should be noted that the standardization of measurements themselves was mostly done by the founding of the country. Authority of the government to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures" is in the constitution. From its founding, the US had one of the largest contiguously agreed upon measurement system in the world, sidestepping the problems of European measurement systems which changed border to border - even predating the official adoption of the Metric system in France. And it's largely why it's stuck around until today.
- darby_nine 2y ago[flagged]
- inglor_cz 2y agoWhile I am frustrated by freedom units sometimes, the truth is that the US simply started too late and the transition costs are too high. It is a different story to change measuring units in a still-mostly-rural society with relatively few engineers and engineering projects - which describes Europe in the late 19th century.
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- jzxy 2y ago>It wasn't until empires and mass manufacturing that the need for "standardized" measurements. You have the cause and effect backwards. Mass manufacturing didn't create a need for standardized measurements. Standardized measurements allowed the existence of mass manufacturing. Mass manufacturing wasn't even close to a possibility before that. Measurements weren't created for a need that didn't even exist yet. You can read on the history of the various systems of measurements and their motivations that they weren't exactly concerned with ideas of "mass production". >In 1669, Jean Picard, a French astronomer, was the first person to measure the Earth accurately. In a survey spanning one degree of latitude, he erred by only 0.44% 1669! that's long before any attempt at building mechanization of labor. It's like how a lot of math was seemingly useless and existed just for its own sake until people found real applications for certain algorithms. The obsession of a handful of people towards precision measurement is what allowed the industrial civilization to truly emerge.
- legitster 2y agoChicken and egg maybe? It depends on where you define the start of industrialization. If you did not have cheap, available steel no one would have wasted it on pressure vessels and saws and instruments of precision. The innovations of Darby and Bessemer were done largely by hand-measured built machines. Jean Picard's tools of measurement themselves would have been custom built by hand for him, and his results were measured in a very regional French measurement of feet. Standardization != precision.
- kragen 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_geodesy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_geodesy says aristotle: off by a factor of almost 2 eratosthenes: off by -2.4–+0.8%, or maybe up to 15%, because we aren't sure how big his stadia were ptolemy: at first accepting eratosthenes' figure, he later switched to a figure that was about 30% low aryabhata: probably off by about 0.8%, though again it's unclear how big his yojana were caliph al-ma'amun: probably off by about 0.45%, and in this case the source of error is not the unit of measurement but the different accounts of how many of them they measured in a degree the fact that 1500 years ago aryabhata bothered to give the earth's diameter as 1581 1⁄24 yojanas strongly suggests that he believed the size of a yojana to be defined to within less than 26 parts per million; remember that he had to do all his calculations mentally or by hand, so extra significant figures were extra significant labor however, all of these measurements postdate the monuments of rameses from 3200 years ago, which contain multiple precisely measured statues constructed all over egypt (though i don't have references on what the tolerances were on the statues)
- btbuildem 2y agoThat's a great observation! Measuring with ruler / tape / string isn't the most reliable way to do it -- using a full length of something like a stick, is. This is the basis of the simplest of jigs: cut a piece, then cut all the other pieces you want to be like that piece, by using that piece as a guide. The need for specific measurements seems to have arisen alongside industrialization of building processes - in the times before that, measurements were relative (eg, piece A is 3x piece B, etc). It's telling that a lot of the "traditional" measurements we have (looking at you, metric system) refer to body parts. We used to measure things in relation to the human body.
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- legitster 2y agoAnother fascinating tidbit I learned from the curator at an air museum - the transition from wooden airplanes to metal airplanes was not a material constraint! In many ways, wood continued to be a superior building material for airplanes even by the advent of WWII. The transition from wood to metal was driven primarily as a manufacturing improvement. Wood changed and warped as you built the airplane, and it required a lot of expertise and knowledge of the properties of wood to properly tie together the structure. Metal weighted more and cost more - but you could step away from a production line and the piece would not have changed shape on you.
- throw0101c 2y ago> In many ways, wood continued to be a superior building material for airplanes even by the advent of WWII. A mostly-wood WW2 airplane: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito
- UncleSlacky 2y agoAlso notably stealthy as a result of its wooden construction: From https://militaryhistorynow.com/2014/11/28/flying-under-the-radar-the-top-secret-history-of-stealth-warplanes/ https://militaryhistorynow.com/2014/11/28/flying-under-the-r... "British aircraft designers got out to an early lead with the De Havilland DH. 98 Mosquito. Introduced in 1941, the twin-engine, fighter/bomber’s airframe was constructed of radar absorbing plywood. While not specifically designed to be stealthy from the outset, the plane’s low signature as well as its top speed of nearly 600 km/h (375 mph) made it a tough target to track for Axis radar operators."
- cjohnson318 2y agoMy dad, a sign painter, would always splay his hand out and measure things from his pinky to his thumb, which was about 10 inches.
- incognito124 2y agoThat's a great title
- foreigner 2y ago[flagged]
- ne8il 2y agoBrendan (the maker of these) is a fascinating, very smart guy. He's a very talented woodworker and wrote a great book on James Krenov. I was lucky to take a class he taught a few years ago, and I enjoy following his Instagram page to see the new projects he has going on.
- detourdog 2y agoI’m excited to see others as focused on this sort re-evaluation of the correct balance between digital and analog tools and manufacturing. This is exactly the area I’m working but this guy is documenting it.
- heikkilevanto 2y agoI have two anecdotes. One is a shipyard in Denmark, possibly in the 1700's, where the master builder would hammer a stake in the ground, walk as many steps as needed for that ship, and hammer another stake. The rest would follow geometrically. The other is a builder of harpsichords, late 1900's, who explained that when starting a new instrument, he would define the "inch" for that one, the width of the "white" keys. 8 of those would make the width of an octave, and the usual 5-6 octaves would give the width of the keyboard. From that he could figure out the length of the instrument, and the curve of the side. All this with nothing more than a compass and a straight edge. He claimed it was the more historical way to do it, as they did in the 1600's. His instruments were well regarded by musicians today, and fetched a good price.
- motohagiography 2y agothese are great. geometry is culture. there are some mythical proportions measured in cubits, handbreadths and other units of measurement (pillars of the first temple at jerusalem, etc) that put reading the old testament in perspective, where they were writing about physical objects we can use those measurements to reason about today. I hope there are more editions of these rules and related ones in the future.
- crtified 2y agoMeasurement by duplication is another fascinating sub-area of tools and techniques. Templates, pin guides, profilers, slotting jigs, tick sticks, ...
- cjohnson318 2y agoIt's neat that the Egyptian measure was subdivided in an increasing fashion, almost logarithmically. I wonder what the error bound is if you use the Egyptian rule as a slide rule.
- wizardforhire 2y agoI think the coolest thing from an experience perspective as far as a built environment with this is the opportunity to have spaces with different ratios and spacing. I’m reminiscing about realizing from an American perspective why buildings in Europe felt so different. Old buildings sure, but new buildings feel weird! It finally dawned on me that the difference between imperial and metric had made its way to the build environment in subtle but pervasive ways that once seen could not be unseen. Case in point, European doors are wider, switches are lower, door handles are lower, rooms are just slightly off. Of course the reverse would be also be true. But contractors rounding to whole units for simplicity had standardized on a set of ratios that made things feel odd. Would be cool to have an installation that embodied this. It’s subtle but talk about driving people crazy.
- inglor_cz 2y agoStandard table height in Europe is 75 cm, which indeed sounds like a convenient rounding. What is the value in the US?
- mauvehaus 2y agoAnywhere between 28" and 30" is in the accepted range, though 28" will feel a little low to most people. I had a table at 31" once, and every time I sat at it, I felt like a kid sitting at the grown-up table. A good reference for stuff like this is Human Dimension and Interior Space: https://archive.org/details/humandimensionin0000pane https://archive.org/details/humandimensionin0000pane
- jinji 2y ago[dead]
- scubbo 2y agoThis was an impressively-"Garden Path" title, given the noun/verb ambiguity of "correct" and the modifier(?)/verb ambiguity of "measuring" :)
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- singleshot_ 2y agoYou could also read the "period" as punctuation and it still almost works. Ambiguously garden-pathable sentence?
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- BitwiseFool 2y agoWhile I am no apologist for the measurement system we use here in the United States, I realized something interesting when trying to explain why almost all of our units consist of easily divisible sub-units. Imagine you needed to split something up into halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, etc.. If you imagine doing this with paper, it's fairly easy. Now imagine Metric, and the need to split something into 10 even pieces. We can make this a little easier knowing that we just need to split into fifths first, and then halve each of those. Do you know how to fold a piece of paper into fifths? It can be done, and it's remarkable how to do this with a straight edge and a pencil. However it is definitely more time consuming than being able to fold using easily divisible numbers. To that end, once you have a decimal ruler you can just use that, but I can see why decimal based measurements were not more common in the past. All that being said, I really wish metrication had been completed here in the US before I was born.
- 082349872349872 2y agoThe nice thing about geometry (as opposed to arithmetic) is that it's easy to guess something a little larger[0] than 1/10, repeat a series of ten of those units, and then line its end points up at an angle to your work and, letting similar triangles do their thing, transfer[1] from there... [0] eg, 1/8 would work, if you insist on subdivisions [1] assuming space-time is effectively euclidean at the scale you're doing this, which even on HN ought to be a safe bet?
- kragen 2y agothis presupposes a way to construct parallel lines to transfer your tenths back to the segment you wanted to subdivide; this can certainly be done to three significant figures of precision with a compass and straightedge (or string and sand table), but it's still extra effort and extra opportunities for error compared to simple perpendicular bisectors in some cases, it's not extra effort because you're doing a task that requires the construction of those parallel lines anyway, of course. laying out tiles on a floor or ripping a plank into smaller planks, for example. and if your desired parallel lines are perpendicular to the edge of your stela, the square that figures so prominently in the freemasons' logotype allows you to scribe them easily (then again, once you're going to the effort of making a square, you might as well rule it)
- ahazred8ta 2y agoTLDR - an ancient measuring rod project (modern reproductions)
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- fusslo 2y agothats a really cool project. I would've loved making them while taking my history electives in college. There's something really nice about making something that gets tied to what you're learning. Since they talk about Roubo, can I ask if any other amateur woodworkers just don't use a ruler? I used to 3d model everything and make simple dimension drawings for parts. Since I started mostly using hand tools I just stopped measuring. Each part is a proportion of the other parts. I find it a whole lot easier, more forgiving, and easier to correct. I do use dividers, however. Just curious if I'm the only one. Of course my disclaimer that the most complicated thing I made without a ruler is a dutch-style workbench out of oak. The most complicated thing I made from my old way of cad was probably a set of fairly complicated shelves
- lostlogin 2y ago> There's something really nice about making something that gets tied to what you're learning. Steiner schools are right into this way of learning. I’m a survivor of that system and now my child goes there. Its interesting seeing it play out from a parents perspective and it’s given me more appreciation for my parents efforts.
- mauvehaus 2y agoFurniture maker (professionally): I typically do Sketchup for design drawings because it's easier for clients to see things in 3D. Do I love it? No, but I'm reasonably quick using it, so I do. It's also a hell of a lot easier to make big changes than working on paper. Shop drawings I do by hand. How much measuring I do depends greatly on how what I'm trying to achieve: If the piece is based heavily on proportions and symmetry[0], I'll use dividers a lot more than a ruler. If I need to hit certain measurements for practical reasons, it's a bit of both. If I'm strictly reproducing a design model, I'll have the ruler out pretty exclusively. Sketchup does do division/even spacing with array copy, so I can usually work out what I want pretty closely. If I'm reproducing a piece from a photo[1], it's a lot of both, some educated rounding to a reasonable fraction, and I've gone entirely crosseyed by the end of the day. Occasionally, I'll do something almost entirely without firm measurements. My tool tote is based on my hand span (because that's about the width you can comfortably carry along your side), and there were no drawings to speak of. Everything was dimensioned at the bench. Stick chairs and stools tend to be pretty similar; if I'm building them out of scrap, I design around the available wood. I'm not sure I'd build any for money yet though. I have a few more learning experiences in me before I do that. [0] https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/cabinet-on-stand https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/cabinet-on-stand [1] https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/federalclock https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/federalclock