Author: Natasha Frost / Source: Atlas Obscura
It’s 7:30 a.m., UTC, and you need to brush your teeth. You switch on the bathroom light. The ceramic tiles are cool on your bare feet. You squeeze a little toothpaste onto the brush, then slide it between your lips and against your teeth.
Brush. Brush, brush. Brush. (This bit takes a while.) Brush. Spit. Swill some water around in your mouth. Rinse. You splash a little tap water into the sink. Toothbrush down. You leave the room, switching the lights off as you go. It’s 7:33 a.m., UTC.In Geneva, Switzerland, at the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, teams of engineers have spent months and months thinking about every single of one of these actions. For each, there’s a standard—for the glazed tiles beneath your toes; the precise chemical properties of your chosen paste, cream, or gel; the filaments that make up your brush. There’s an international standard behind the time on your watch and the water that flows through the pipes. As you go through your day, you will come into contact with countless others, without even realizing it. Each one is the product of a minimum of 18 months’ to-and-fro, and sometimes as much as three to five years. Then, within five years of being settled, they’ll be revised all over again.
It can be hard to find the joy in the minutiae of ISO—pages upon pages of acronyms, meeting notes, nuts-and-bolts bureaucracy about actual nuts and bolts. But without it, and the standardization it provides, the world would be a significantly more chaotic place. Understanding how the organization came to be requires a journey back through the history of modern standardization, a peek at some of the stranger—and most instrumental—standards, and a look at its political philosophy, one that stands in stark contrast to how most internationally significant decisions are made elsewhere in the world.
Standardization becomes critical in a connected world. If you never come into contact with your faraway neighbors, it doesn’t especially matter whether you use the same measurements, operate by the same clock, or have the same size windows in your workplace. The Industrial Revolution, however, had the effect of shrinking the world—journeys which would once have been unthinkably long could now take place in the space of weeks, or even days. And for that, there needed to be cooperation along the line.
In mid-19th-century United States, this became especially clear as railroads began to stripe across the country for the first time. Each place used its own measure to determine the space between the rails on the track. Some track gauge measurements were narrow—in parts of Maine, just two feet wide. Other places, like New York State, favored a gauge of up to six feet. If everybody remained in their “area,” this didn’t represent an especial problem. But increasingly, people, and goods, needed to be moved great distances, from one place to the next. Usually, railways resorted to a break of gauge, where everything and everyone would trundle off one train operating on one gauge, and onto the next train which operated on a different gauge. But this was an expensive, time-consuming solution and, as trade between the Midwest and the East mushroomed after the Civil War, it became a nuisance for trading companies.
By 1880, most North American railways had agreed to convert to a standard gauge—4 ft 8 1⁄2 in, or 1435 mm. At the end of May 1886, the southern railways capitulated, and changed their own lines to approximately the same gauge. This seemingly arbitrary measure is now the standard across much of the world, and used in around 55 percent of railways. It was transitions such as these that began to impress upon people how important it was, from an engineering perspective, to use the same systems across states, countries, and the world.
Gradually, nations began to have their own organizations for standardization—first Britain, in 1901, with the Engineering Standards Committee. (They are now the BSI Group, with the charming tagline: “Making excellence a habit.”) Germany and the United States followed suit, in 1918: The American Engineering Standards Committee, founded by five engineering societies and three government agencies, became the American National Standards Institute in 1969.
The earliest example of international standardization, however, did not include Britain or the United States. Despite being founded in New York, the International Federation of the National Standardizing Association (known as ISA and established in 1926) was a mostly continental Europe body. (America and Britain’s reliance on imperial measurements did not make membership a particularly sensible option for either.) ISA began to lay the groundwork for standards across mechanical engineering out of its Swiss headquarters, but was brought to a crashing halt by the Second World War. In 1942, it was mothballed.
In 1946, when the war was over, delegates from 25 countries met at London’s Institute of Civil Engineers. The city was still reeling from bombing and rationing, and Willy Kuert, who had traveled from Switzerland for the meeting, recalled a city that was “still partly destroyed.” In the wake of this international conflict, the delegates sought an organization that prioritized international cooperation. “We went to London, we Swiss, hoping to create a new organization which would do the work of standardization in a democratic way, and not cost too much money,” Kuert wrote in the ISO’s self-published history, Friendship Among Equals. “At the end of the London conference, we had the…
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