Government Involvement with Fundamental Standards: The Metric System

Modern measurement standards were essential precursors to the industrial standards that make up the bulk of standards produced by today's global standard-setting system. In France, although leaders of the French Revolution had demanded national weights and measures to eliminate the seigneurage collected by the local nobility in the old system, the metric system presented to the National Assembly in 1799 was not officially adopted and enforced nationwide until 1840. By 1851 the French government championed the metric system as a potential global standard, displaying a meter rod, a kilogram weight, and a liter container at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exposition in London.Footnote ² In 1855, businessmen and diplomats from Europe and the Americas, led by Baron Jacques Rothschild, created the private Association for Obtaining a Uniform Decimal System of Measures, Weights, and Coins, to promote the system's adoption. In the nineteenth century many governments of continental Europe's industrializing countries did so (e.g., the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany), as did the governments of the largest economies in Latin America (e.g., Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina). Many more governments would do so by the 1920s (e.g., Japan, Russia) or soon after World War II (e.g., Indonesia, South Korea). In contrast, the United Kingdom announced it would begin to convert to the metric system only in 1965 (a process that is still incomplete), and although the U.S. Congress passed the voluntary Metric Conversion Act in 1975, the Reagan administration suspended its funding in 1982, ending the U.S. effort.

Why did some governments adopt the metric system early, while other governments have never made it mandatory? Our first two articles address this puzzle, examining attempts by citizens to persuade the governments of two New World countries to go metric. Anne Hanley looks at the ultimately successful (though not free of controversy) adoption of the metric system in Brazil, while Stephen Mihm examines one of several unsuccessful attempts to convince the U.S. government to adopt the system. In these two cases, scientists and engineers played important but very different roles.

When Brazil's government adopted the metric system, the country had been independent of Portugal for four decades but was still a non-industrialized country with many local measurement systems, a large Indigenous population, and an economy based on African slavery. Why did it adopt the metric system so early (1862, with implementation by 1872)? In “Men of Science and Standards: Introducing the Metric System in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Hanley explains that the nation's scientists and engineers (many educated in Portugal) supported this move, which they saw as essential to the economic advancement of their young country. The system was implemented despite uprisings among peasants in a backcountry region. Previous scholars, Hanley notes, have argued that this elite support was an example of adopting “misplaced ideas” from Europe, but she contends that the situation is more complicated than that. Advocates were undoubtedly influenced by a transnational community of scientists and engineers who thought standards were important to trade and industrialization, but she demonstrates that these Brazilian scientists and engineers were also well embedded in Brazilian society and important to their government's developmental mission. These elites convinced the government to adopt the metric system, laying the groundwork for international trade and industrial activity.

The United States was well ahead of Brazil in industrialization, with its cloth mills, railroads, and machine shops, but it rejected the metric system, posing a different puzzle. Common wisdom among historians and others is that nativists and the uneducated opposed it—a view that Mihm, in “Inching toward Modernity: Industrial Standards and the Fate of the Metric System in the United States,” shows to be mistaken. In 1880 and again at the turn of the century, members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and their business allies in the National Association of Manufacturers fought off attempts in Congress to adopt the metric system. Why did these well-educated engineers and manufacturers oppose this seemingly progressive move? In the late nineteenth century, American engineers, working within engineering societies, had already begun standardizing some industrial items (e.g., screw threads and steel rails for railroads) using the inch system. Mihm shows that they feared the adoption of metric units might reverse that progress. Leading engineers and manufacturers testified against the metric system in Congress in 1906, defeating the push to adopt the metric system led by Samuel Stratton, head of the new and weak National Bureau of Standards. Early U.S. progress in private industrial standardization using the inch system apparently impeded governmental standardization of different fundamental measurements, and, as a result, prevented alignment between U.S. national measurement standards and the metric system that would soon operate throughout most of the global economy.

The two cases together clarify a larger puzzle. Both cases recognize the importance of fundamental standards to industrialization and industrial standardization, but the countries involved were at different phases of development: before industrialization had taken off in Brazil, and after industrialization and standardization were well underway using the inch system in the United States. American engineers and manufacturers already had vested interests in machines, products, and standards based on local traditional measurements, making a change in measurement systems a threat (rather than a boon) to industrialization and standardization.

Private Industrial Standardization and the EU's New Approach

From the late nineteenth century through the establishment of the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) in 1946, private standard-setting organizations spread from nation to nation, and ultimately across the world, providing an infrastructure for the global industrial economy. Governments of European and other countries used intergovernmental bodies to coordinate telegraph and telephone systems, which were government owned in all the leading industrialized countries except the United States, but they were reluctant to set standards for other industries, leaving unfilled gaps as the need for compatible iron and steel parts, machinery, electrical equipment, and other products of industry grew. Seeking a public service role to reinforce their newly claimed identity as professionals, engineers and their societies stepped forward to fill those gaps. But setting standards often required expertise from multiple engineering domains.Footnote ³ In 1901, engineers from five British technical societies came together to form the first broad national standard-setting body. Industry associations, firms, and government departments (as purchasers of products) joined the founding societies as members. They established a lengthy consensus process in which committees of engineers representing a balance of producers, purchasers, and the public interest developed industrial standards that manufacturing and purchasing firms would voluntarily adopt.

The British national standards body provided the model that engineers in most industrializing countries copied in the early twentieth century. Although individual engineering and industry societies continued to develop some standards in many countries, they adopted similar processes and often proposed their standards to the national standards body where they went through the process to become national standards. The engineers who established the national bodies across Europe, the Americas, East Asia, and Oceania formed a surprisingly close-knit international community and movement dedicated to promoting industrial standardization to improve the quality of life, promote prosperity, and contribute to international peace. From the start, leaders of this movement were internationalists who sought to create a global economy, and only five years after the formation of Britain's national standards body, members of many national electrical engineering societies established the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to set international standards in the newest engineering domain. Unlike the intergovernmental associations for telegraph and telephone, this private international body included national delegations chosen by electrical engineering societies, not governments. Standardizers later attempted to establish a broader international standards body, but World War II put the goal of international standardization on hold.

In 1946 standardizers from the victorious nations gathered in London to establish a private, broad-based international standards body: ISO. They navigated the postwar political currents, bringing former Axis countries into ISO long before they were admitted into the intergovernmental United Nations and assuring that the Soviet Union and its allies remained active members of the standards community. From the late 1960s onward, ISO set standards that would integrate the global economy. ISO's technical committees on containers and ports established, revised, and maintained the standards that have (until the COVID-19 pandemic) so successfully supported the supply chains linking the global manufacturing system.Footnote ⁴ ISO and IEC also developed computer and telecommunications standards essential to the digital economy, although that standards story is more complex, as the next section will demonstrate. During the same period, standardizers active in national bodies and in ISO also established another private, voluntary standards body, the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), to serve both the six countries of the European Economic Community (EEC) and seven non-member European countries, bringing us to the third article in this issue.

Grace Ballor's “CE Marking, Business, and European Market Integration” addresses the puzzle of why a private body, rather than an intergovernmental body such as the EEC, initiated Europe-wide standard setting and why a hybrid, public-private system eventually grew around that private core. Ballor focuses on how the system of CE marking—in conjunction with the European Union (EU, successor of the EEC), the European Free Trade Association (EFTA, initially formed by the seven non-EEC countries), and the European standards bodies (CEN plus two bodies added later)—has shaped “the relationship between business and governance in Europe,” integrating the European economy. During the 1960s and 1970s, both CEN and the EEC/EU tried unsuccessfully to overcome national boundaries to free trade. The European intergovernmental bodies lacked the technical expertise to set workable standards through legislation, and CEN could not impose its voluntary standards. Beginning in the 1980s, the European Commission proposed that the expanded EU and CEN and the other private European standards bodies work together to remove and prevent standards barriers to inter-European trade. EFTA, whose members were active in CEN, quickly joined the effort. In 1985 the EU announced its “New Approach to Technical Harmonization and Standardization,” which allowed the EU to legislate what it called essential requirements and CEN to set detailed technical standards that provided one (but not necessarily the only) way to fulfill these requirements, thus retaining the private standards’ voluntary status. The European Roundtable of Industrialists, which met regularly with the Commission, supported this approach because it created an integrated European market for its members' goods through voluntary, not mandatory, means. The new system encouraged certification of products meeting the essential requirements. In 1992, in a last-minute rush to complete the single market on schedule, the European Commission approved a “Global Approach to Conformity Assessment and Certification” that included processes for CE marking.

The EU was only able to create a single market by collaborating with private standard-setting bodies in this hybrid system of governance. It built on the existing private standardization system. Meanwhile, beginning in the late 1980s, another change—of kind, as well as scope—in private standard setting was taking place in the United States, with major implications for the global economy.

Internetworking Ushers in New Types of Private Standard Setting

After World War II, and building on wartime innovations, the computer industry developed rapidly. In the early 1960s, existing private standards committees in engineering societies and national and international standards bodies were addressing standards for computer hardware in the United States and beyond. But in the 1980s, alternative ways of setting private standards would emerge around internetworking to challenge traditional private standards bodies.Footnote ⁵ First to appear were corporate consortia, groups of firms that came together to develop or support a new standard, often for software. A consortium typically started with a few firms, often representing only one set of stakeholders (e.g., either user firms or producer firms). With limited and like-minded members, these consortia established standards much more rapidly than traditional balanced-stakeholder bodies and became so popular by the late 1980s that ISO and IEC, afraid of becoming irrelevant in this domain, developed fast-track processes to enable consortium standards to go through a truncated process to become ISO or IEC standards.

Another challenge to traditional private standard setting emerged in the late 1980s around internetworking standards. In the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency had launched ARPANET to connect computers at universities and defense contractors where it funded basic research in computer science. In 1983—by which time ARPANET had expanded in size and scope and adopted the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) data communication system—the Defense Department spun off a civilian internet, establishing a body of “elder statesmen” to set its strategy. Two years later that body created a group of young computer scientists, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), to manage its operating standards, following the model for ARPANET's operations.

Meanwhile, in 1977 ISO launched a standard-setting committee for connecting networks developed by different firms and government agencies, and the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies supported its work. But after the ISO committee established a seven-layer reference model in the early 1980s, the process bogged down in developing standards for each layer. Ultimately the simpler TCP/IP, already being used successfully by the rapidly growing commercial Internet, became the de facto standard for internetworking, and the IETF became the de facto private standards body for the Internet, a position it still holds today. Despite its U.S. origins, it soon became effectively global as the Internet spread around the world. Although its standards were voluntary, free, and (by the late 1980s) nongovernmental, IETF's process differed significantly from that of other private standards bodies; it had no membership (anyone could attend any meeting), no formal voting, no required balance of stakeholders, no system for representing different parts of the world, and a famously raucous, argumentative style.

So how did corporate consortia and the IETF become so important, challenging traditional modes of private standard setting? Andrew L. Russell, James Pelkey, and Loring Robbins's article, “The Business of Internetworking: Standards, Start-ups, and Network Effects,” addresses this puzzle by delving into the competitive strategies of firms—both large firms and, especially, small, entrepreneurial start-ups (which often became large firms)—in the internetworking story. They draw on a unique set of sources—market data collected by, and interviews conducted by, Pelkey in 1988–89, in his capacity as an investor—that provide invaluable insights into the motives and problems of businesses involved in creating and marketing networking and internetworking products like modems, switches, and routers. Firms working in this space needed fundamentally new standards to enlarge their potential markets, and the authors reveal the strategic actions they took that assured such standards would emerge. Three large companies—DEC, Intel, and Xerox—combined forces in the DIX (vertical) corporate consortium to develop and promote the Ethernet local area network so the market for LANs could grow and prices fall. They made the Ethernet specification openly available through publication in the 1980 “Blue Book” and subsequently supported it in the traditional Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards committee working on a LAN standard, where it was chosen as one of three acceptable standards. Its open and free availability attracted start-ups in this market, over the other two options.

Similarly, in the late 1980s, with the ISO effort bogged down, start-ups and other firms had to make choices, and TCP/IP became the de facto standard when enough relevant players offered internetworking technologies based on it. They did so because it was simple, cheap, and already successfully running in many operations; in addition, Dan Lynch, a computer scientist involved in developing TCP/IP in the 1970s, marketed the protocol as a standard in the late 1980s. When TCP/IP became the de facto standard, IETF became the leading global standardization body for the internet. The Russell, Pelkey, and Robbins article, which takes the perspective of firms operating in this new field, reveals that the surprising ascendance of TCP/IP was a consequence (albeit unintended) of these firms’ strategic interactions, just as were the standards created by consortia and subsequently ratified by traditional industrial standards bodies such as the IEEE, IEC, and ISO.

If the rise of information technology consortia and the IETF reflects how business strategies of private firms influenced private standards, the final article in this issue examines an industry where governments have long been active regulators, revealing how private-sector interests can shape even a government-initiated system of standardization.

Food Safety and Transparency in the United States: Standards as Regulation

In “Standards as Consumer Protection: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's System of Food Standards, 1930s–1960s,” Xaq Frohlich examines the unusual case of the U.S. government's regulation of food safety and transparency through the FDA's food standards of identity. A government enforcing health and safety standards is not inherently unusual; U.S. experts, like those in other countries, often believed that safety standards should be mandatory and enforced by law. Nevertheless, they frequently saw private standard-setting bodies as the best place for standards to be developed, before they were mandated by government. Frohlich's article addresses the puzzle of why the FDA chose instead to develop its own standards and how industry ultimately pushed back, resulting in a return to a hybrid, public-private model of standard setting.

As food became increasingly industrial in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some parts of the food industry developed private quality standards used among producers, wholesalers, and retailers, but retailers did not typically communicate them to consumers; instead, they developed branding to distinguish themselves in the market. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) developed voluntary quality standards that producers could adopt to allow financial valuation of their agricultural products, protecting farmers and ranchers but not consumers. In the early twentieth century, the FDA worried about food adulteration, a threat to the health and safety of consumers and a form of fraud. Consequently, it sought transparency, or a return to “self-evident” food. No legislation, however, allowed the FDA to prohibit adulteration before the fact; it could only pursue fraud in the courts after a product was on the market. After multiple attempts to pass such regulatory legislation were caught up in legislative battles, Congress finally passed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which allowed the FDA to promulgate standards of identity for mass-produced foods. These standards specified the ingredients and their proportions in industrial food items allowed to be called a particular name (e.g., ice cream, peanut butter), thus providing a floor, but not a ceiling, for quality and safety. To establish these standards, the FDA publicized a recommendation; held (often contentious) hearings to get input from concerned parties, including food industries, consumer groups, and health representatives; and then declared a legal standard. Food items not meeting the standards were required to be labeled as “imitation” (e.g., imitation ice cream) and to list all ingredients.

Although the system initially seemed to contain adulteration and impose some order on the market, by the 1960s, Frohlich shows, it began to break down as the food industry developed more specialized, often dietary, additives (e.g., low-calorie artificial sweeteners, vitamins), which consumers and the food industry wanted but the FDA opposed in most foods. By the late 1960s the food industry and Republican administrations were increasingly attacking and ridiculing FDA standards of identity as constraints on consumer choice. In response, the FDA ceased to set new identity standards in 1973 and adopted the ingredient labeling that American consumers see today, allowing the food industry to proliferate new products as they had wished. Meanwhile, Frolich notes, “regulators from the FDA joined industry and government representatives from around the world in developing a global food safety regime of food standards known as the Codex Alimentarius.” The battle around food safety moved to this international, quasi-voluntary body, overseen by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, in which experts representing private and public stakeholders sought consensus on standards. National governments could then make the standards mandatory or not, as they preferred.

This article emphasizes the power of industry relative to that of government in standard setting. The U.S. food industry wanted to expand the range of products it could develop to tempt consumers, and it persuaded the federal government to move away from the increasingly questioned food identity standards that got in its way. But by noting the shift to the Codex Alimentarius, Frohlich also acknowledges the power of the hybrid, public-private model of regulatory standard setting.

Conclusion

The five articles in this issue illuminate the nature and development of the complicated public-private system of standard setting on which the world economy depends today, providing answers to some of the puzzles it poses. The interests and strategic actions of firms and industries, the government's capacity and interests, the push to create wider global markets, and the expertise of scientists and engineers have combined to establish and maintain or modify the complicated standards system, without which the global economy could not function.