Indus Valley weights stayed consistent for at least 500 years
Archaeologists measured 558 weights dug from Mohenjo-daro, Harappa and Chanhu-daro and found no meaningful drift across five layers of settlement. Someone was enforcing a standard for at least five centuries. Standardisation is that same idea of agreed measures, and modern industry would be unthinkable without it.
At heart, a standard solves a coordination problem: everyone benefits, but only if everyone makes the same choice. Indus merchants used small weights for luxury goods and larger ones for grain, all in fixed multiples of a base unit, with 13.7 grams apparently one common measure. Divergent standards, by contrast, impose costs, and economists count clashing national rules as a hidden barrier to trade.
The Industrial Revolution made precision essential. Before 1800, screw threads were usually cut freehand with chisels and files, and nuts were rare. Henry Maudslay's screw-cutting lathe of that year made it practical to repeat thread sizes exactly, opening the way to interchangeable nuts and bolts. In 1841 companies across Britain adopted Joseph Whitworth's measurements, with a 55 degree thread angle, as an unofficial national standard; the Royal Navy's Crimean War gunboats became the first case of mass production in marine engineering. The American Unified thread, by contrast, settled on 60 degrees with flattened crests, and a half-inch bolt carries 13 threads per inch rather than Whitworth's 12.
Trade pushed further. In 1865 the International Telegraph Union was formed so national telegraph networks could connect, making it the first modern intergovernmental organisation. By 1900 one frustrated British steel dealer complained in The Times that no two engineers specified the same sections. London answered in 1901 with the Engineering Standards Committee, the first national standards body, which later became the British Standards Institution. Germany followed in 1917, and the United States and France in 1918.
Electricity was chaotic too. In the 1890s companies picked their own voltages, frequencies and even circuit symbols, so adjacent buildings could be totally incompatible. R. E. B. Crompton presented a paper on the problem at an international congress in St Louis in 1904, which led to a permanent standards commission. After the Second World War, delegates from 25 countries met in London in October 1946 and created the International Organization for Standardization, which began work in February 1947.
Source: Standardization
