How do companies that make measuring tools like rulers make sure the product is accurate? Is there a universally ruler that is used to check? How do they make sure the measurements are exact?
In: Engineering
Adding to the answers: there used to be a “standard bar” for measurements. If you go to Bern, they have in the street the metal bars every mason used for copy and make their own rulers to build the city (it’s one of the “new cities” by the Zahringen counts from scratch).
Obviously this varied from town to town and country to country, hence why they came up with the metre… whose definition was wrong, …several times. But they had in Paris a “standard bar” of a metal that didn’t expand or contract “much” with temperature. This bar was copied and distributed. factories use stable materials for the copy. The final product wouldn’t be that accurate but “good enough”.
Nowadays these “geniuses” define the metre as something no one will be able to reproduce. That’s why I, as an European architect, still prefer old measurement systems, using them everyday, since I like the flexibility. If a space needs to be 12 feet in length I don’t care if it will translate to 3.82, 3.60 or 3.42 m; your brain doesn’t care and a house it’s not going to explode because of that.
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