17. PERFECTIONISM – The Perfectionism of Joseph Whitworth
It was the early 1800s, and figuring out the length of things was always inaccurate and variable. Efforts were made to standardize the weights and measures of things, but far from perfect. In 1824, Joseph’s British government declared an inch to be equal to the length of three dried and round grains of barleycorn placed end to end. (Oddly enough, today, your shoe size is based on the barley- corn unit of measurement. A size 11 shoe is 35 barleycorns long.)
To make matters worse, the three-barleycorn inch of Britain was a bit shorter than the French inch and a bit longer than the inch of Germany — in fact, pretty much every country had a different inch size. To confuse matters further, methods of measuring varied from person to person. There was the nail (the distance from the end of the middle finger to the second joint), the shaftment (the width of the fist and outstretched thumb), and the ell (the length of the fore- arm and extended hand). Joseph knew he could do better than measurement with barley- corns and forearms. In 1833, he opened his own company, his sign stating proudly: “Joseph Whitworth, the Tool-Maker from London.” With greater precision in mind, he introduced a foot-long ruler on which each inch was marked into thirty-two very small sec- tions. The Manchester City News reported on this achievement
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