THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World

Alder delivers a triple whammy with this elegant history of technology, acute cultural chronicle and riveting intellectual adventure built around Delambre's and Méchain's famed meridian expedition of 1792–1799 to calculate the length of the meter. Disclosing for the first time details from the astronomers' personal correspondences (and supplementing his research with a bicycle tour of their route), Alder reveals how the exacting Méchain made a mistake in his calculations, which he covered up, and which tortured him until his death. Méchain, remarkably scrupulous even in his doctoring of the data, was driven in part by his conviction that the quest for precision and a universal measure would disclose the ordered world of 18th-century natural philosophy, not the eccentric, misshapen world the numbers suggested. Indeed, Alder has placed Delambre and Méchain squarely in the larger context of the Enlightenment's quest for perfection in nature and its startling discovery of a world "too irregular to serve as its own measure." Particularly fascinating is his treatment of the politics of 18th-century measurement, notably the challenge the savants of the period faced in imposing a standard of weights and measures in the complicated post–ancien régime climate. Alder convincingly argues that science and self-knowledge are matters of inference, and by extension prone to error. Delambre, a Skeptical Stoic, was the more pragmatic and, perhaps, the more modern of the two astronomers, settling as he did for honesty in error where precision was out of reach. (Oct.)

Forecast:Tales of innovations made by fascinating characters against long odds have undoubted appeal—witness Longitude, The Map That Changed the World, even The Professor and the Madman. With the Free Press's big publicity push—including a 10-city author tour and 20-city radio satellite tour— The Measure of All Things looks ready to join their bestselling ranks.