Standards and Testing, The Key to Quality

Weidlein and Reck [1], in a paper titled “A Million Years of Standards” state, “Standards are as old as man. The spoken word, perhaps the oldest standard of all, grew up with him; others slowly developed over the millenia. Standards of behavior, which may ante­ date even the language, crystallized gradually as folkways and mores, and as practices of worship.” Although we are not interested in those types of standards here, we are interested in a number of different types, and the first of these might be called measurement standards. M EA SU R EM EN T STANDARDS The most basic of measurement standards are those for length, mass, and time. As man began to construct things he found it neces­ sary to develop some unit or units of length. Such units as the span of the hand, length of the foot, distance between the tips of the fingers with arms outstretched, and others were useful for short distances. A day’s journey served as a longer unit. There were no free yardsticks to be had for the asking at a local lumber yard or hardware store. Many ancient civilizations developed local standards of length which were used in their building and were carried by them into the lands they conquered. Some of these were well defined in terms of markings on durable pieces of stone, but as late as 1120 A.D. King Henry I of England ordered that the ell, the ancient yardstick, should be the exact length of his arm, and commanded that that distance henceforth be the standard unit of comparison of lengths throughout his kingdom. Today, the civilized world measures distances and lengths, whether a fraction of a millionth of an inch or an interplanetary distance, in terms of the distance between two fine lines on a platinum-iridium standard meter bar kept at Sevres, a suburb of Paris. Duplicate bars