The Story of Measurement
By Andrew Robinson
Thames & Hudson £19.95, 224 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.96

This is a big book: 10 x 8ins or, as they would have said in the 14th century when there were 36 grains of barley to the foot, “30 x 24 barleycorns”. As for its scope, The Story of Measurement covers not merely the obvious elements that we record – distance, time, temperature – but also the more intriguing: body mass, light frequencies, scientists’ peer group ratings and stress of both humans and building materials.

Back in the ice ages our ancestors were cutting notches on bones to make a lunar calendar. Today we have seismographs for earthquakes, togmeters for the warmth rating of duvets, and Geiger counters clicking once per second for background radiation and 1,500 times to indicate the scale of the Chernobyl disaster. Radiation exposure is measured in “grays”, after Louis Gray – 0.1 brings mild nausea, while 20 grays mean certain death after a few days. Hurricane “Level 5” is top of the range, with winds above 251kph.

The Pain Rating Index puts a sprain at 16 and a finger amputation at 41. Calories are burnt at 1,120 per hour by a skier climbing up the piste, while sitting and breathing gently consumes 80. A pollen count of 30 grains per cubic metre of air is low, while 150 gives a high sneeze factor. For skin that would normally burn after 12 minutes, a Sun Protection Factor of 30 allows six hours (30 times 12 minutes) on the beach in a bikini.

Extreme measurements can be made user-friendly. The number of stars in the universe runs into billions of trillions – a trillion being, more neatly, 10 to the power of 12. Another neat unit is the A or Angstrom, approximately the radius of a chlorine molecule.

However, numbers can add to the chaos. Historically, the cubit wobbled about between 46 and 56cm. In 1566 the barleycorn was devalued, from 36 to 64 per foot; it didn’t help that the foot varied too, according to whose feet were being used as the standard.

Just before the French Revolution, there were a quarter of a million different measures. Faced with this metrological madness, the revolutionaries came up with the 100 second minute, the 100-minute hour and the 10-hour day – a system which lasted about 10 (60-second) minutes.

Far from being a book of lists, this volume is crammed with illustrations of callipers for measuring cannonballs and of galaxies in the far reaches of the universe. Each page contains a short article on an aspect of measurement, from the abacus to zero. Occasionally Andrew Robinson is slightly too discursive – library systems are classification not measurement – but this fault scores less than 10-to-the-minus-10 on my Critical Rating Scale. As they say, who’s counting?