4/12/2022 0 Comments A non-boaty blog itemStandards I don't often write anything political but this has been bugging me for years.
At school my favourite subjects were 'practical' which at a boys grammar in the 60s meant woodwork, metalwork and tech drawing. The metalwork syllabus included a bit of engineering history and a decent chunk of that was to do with Standards. For those lacking a technical education, a brief summary: People have made things for hundreds of thousands of years, often very sophisticated things. Each maker developed their own techniques and passed them on to others who then adapted and adjusted to suit their circumstances, materials and needs and passed on what they had learnt. By the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, often reckoned in the UK to kick-off in 1760 with the opening of the Bridgwater canal in Manchester, millwrights, smiths, woodworkers and builders were doing quite technical things but in the old craft tradition. Each mill, each machine was a one-off made by one person or a small team directed by one person. Every component, every screw, was hand made and if the person who made the nuts and bolts that held your mill together had moved on it would be tricky to get replacements to fit. Increasing mechanisation made this a more pressing problem, but also provided part of the answer. Once the screw-cutting lathe had been developed anyone with such a lathe could make any size screw they wanted including copies of those made by others. But each was still made to the individual engineer's specification. This changed in 1841 when Joseph Whitworth's specification for standardised screw threads started to be used. It was taken up first by railway companies and later adopted nationally as British Standard Whitworth. Standards weren't a wholly new idea even then, for several centuries monarchs and governments had been in the business of setting standards for weights and measures, and appointing market supervisors to stop vendors cheating. Whitworth's breakthrough was to bring the same idea to manufacturing. In time other countries developed alternative standards and everywhere new standards arose for particular applications, in the UK, BA for fine electrical engineering screws for example. BSF for engineering especially in steel, BSW continued to be preferred for threads in more brittle cast iron, in the US Edison screws for light bulbs. For railway companies and other national concerns the advantages were obvious. If your train from London needed a replacement in Edinburgh it would be available, and fit. If your company amalgamated with another or arranged to run on each other's tracks your rolling stock spares situation would be greatly simplified. And it wasn't just screws of course, soon there were standards for all sorts of things: gears, bearings, chains, belts & pulleys. Ammunition. This was the state of things when I took O Level engineering in 1968. But change was coming. Britain was in the process of applying to join the Common Market and although use of metric units wasn't a requirement of entry the government was keen to demonstrate its willingness to adhere to European standards. Most of Europe was by then using Systeme Internationale (SI) units. The history of decimal measurement systems is long and complicated but the first coherent metric system was developed in the 1860s and adopted by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (commonly the BA) in 1872. This system, CGS (centimetre, gram, second), was supplanted by MKSA (metre, kilogram, second, amp) 20 years later and is the basis of SI. Napoleon's conquest of most of Europe spread the MKSA system widely, but not to the UK although it has been used in science since the nineteenth century. With new measures came new standards in manufacture such as metric screw threads, preferred sizes of bearings, wire gauges and so on. It wasn't just politicians keen to demonstrate their European credentials, industry broadly favoured metrication too. Small traders were annoyed at changes to their work habits but for multinational concerns it greatly simplified production and export trade. Car companies like Ford no longer had to make Cortinas using UK standards (by then influenced by US standards such as UNC screw threads) and Taunus models in Germany using metric. They could develop a range of vehicles to be made in different plants across the continent and sold across the continent. The consequence for me was that although my O level engineering was in Imperial measure, my A level two years later was done in metric. Subsequently of course our politicians have fudged a lot of the implementation of metric for domestic use leaving us trying to use both systems often in the same shop but for international trade SI is the most common standard. Technically international trade was now a lot easier, but non-technical barriers persisted. Cross border trade in Europe was hindered by tariffs and non-tariff barriers such as quotas and varying specification and inspection regimes. Countries were unwilling to expose their producers to what was perceived as unfair competition from places with lower standards, not necessarily technical standards which were pretty well fixed, but things like working hours and conditions, health and safety provision, animal welfare, pollution controls and so on. The answer came from what now seems an unlikely source. Margaret Thatcher. At the time it didn't seem that remarkable. She had a science degree and understood a bit about commerce. She saw that the easiest way to stop improved social conditions in the UK making our goods uncompetitive internationally was to have the same standards as our biggest trading partners. And if we did have the same standards then there would be no need for tariffs and other barriers to protect producers. She didn't create the Single Market system in the EU single-handed but was instrumental in pushing it forward when other nations preferred protectionism. Standards had taken another leap forward. First we had local standards, then national and now international standards covering a huge range of products and services designed to make sure European Union members traded fairly with each other. And because the EU is an important market for many other countries and blocs EU standards are often incorporated into trade agreements ensuring things prohibited or enforced by EU law also apply to importers. Anybody who had anything to do with international trade found this very convenient. Most of the public soon took it for granted. Few were bothered by Spanish ham, Polish fruit, French cheese, German cars, Italian wine. There was some criticism of the number of foreign-registered trucks operating in the UK but if you took a ferry to France you'd see a lot of trucks with GB plates heading in the opposite direction. Trade was good, for all of us. But. Some people didn't get it. The popular press from the 70s onwards stirred up antipathy to the Common Market, EEC, EU project and managed to conflate decimal currency (introduced in 1970 before UK joined the Common Market) metric measure (that system adopted by the BA in LONDON in 1872) with "Europe". Even things that obviously benefited UK workers such as the Working Time Directive were seen here as unwarranted interference in our employment law by "Unelected Bureaucrats in Brussels". This ignores the fact that all OUR bureaucrats are unelected too, we call them civil servants and they work for the elected government. In the EU the Commission works for the elected EU parliament. Battles over weights and measures were re-fought in greengrocers and butchers and petrol stations. Pubs were finally exempted and allowed to continue to sell draught beer in Imperial measures. Bottled drinks and spirit shots were converted to metric with little or no problem. After 40 years of argument that disrupted normal politics here for a generation the Europhobes eventually got their way and won the Brexit referendum. Now those same Europhobes are trying to remove from our law all the rules put in place to meet EU regulations. Undoing the best thing their heroine ever did and in Rees Mogg's case advocating a return to the Imperial system of measure. Any divergence of rules between EU and UK will have detrimental economic and social consequences. Producers selling in both markets will have to adhere to two different rule books, possibly maintain two different supply chains and production lines and be able to demonstrate that goods shipped to a particular market meet that market's rules. That's not going to cut anyone's costs. Producers operating solely in the UK might benefit if the rules were 'relaxed' here but do we really want lower quality goods and services? Its very easy to blame Brussels for all our ills and promise a bonfire of regulations but all of those regulations were put in place to enforce standards of weights & measures, of manufacturing and production processes, of employee terms and conditions, of material specifications, of health and safety, of environmental protection, of dispute resolution, of criminal justice and a host of other things by a democratic parliament in the EU supported by the Commission and ratified by each member state's parliament. Standards are not a foreign imposition we should throw off, they are integral to how everything works and they work best when shared as widely as possible.
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AuthorPhil, owner, captain, chief engineer, electrician, carpenter, cook and comms manager of Seren Archives
April 2024
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