Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast. We your guide to the numbers all around

us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halfard.

You've probably noticed that here at More or Less we really like to get the measure

of things, but have you ever wondered why we measure the world around us in the way

that we do, whether that be the distance to the moon, the temperature of an oven, or

the size of our bank balance? James Vincent became fascinated with the history of measurement

after visiting France a few years ago to report on the past and future of the mighty kilogram,

or more precisely, how the way of measuring a kilogram would no longer be reliant on the

survival of a single metal cylinder sitting in a vault in Paris. He was so taken with

a whole thing he decided to investigate when and why we became so eager to measure things.

We can't say for certain when it began. I think that it probably began tens and tens

of thousands of years ago. The first evidence we have is not written, and it's perhaps

spurious to call it measurement, but it would be ancient tally bones, and these are sort

of bones taken from animals. There's a baboon fibula, there is the Czechoslovakia wolf

bone, and they are marked with intervals on them that although it's difficult to tell

the exact purpose of these, we believe these were sort of tally markings of some sort.

Someone was keeping count of something, they were measuring something. Counting and measuring

seemed different, or do they all blur into one once you look at them closely enough?

I think they blur into one. I think the invention of measurement comes almost alongside the

invention of counting and indeed the invention of writing, because these systems all need

to be developed hand in hand. So the earliest records we have of this pass these sort of

deep speculative archaeological finds, the earliest legal text essentially. For example,

...