Roughing It

When Méchain and Delambre set out in the summer of 1792, the Revolution had become, in Delambre's words, "truly frightening." Méchain's instruments perplexed the southern peasants, who jailed him as a counter-revolutionary. Officials who understood numbers eventually procured his release. He decided that he would be safer in Spain, and so began his mapping there, with great efficiency until an injury compelled him to break off early in 1793. By the time he had recovered and completed the arc in Spain, with an immaculate determination of the latitude of the southern terminus at Montjouy, the Spanish government had closed the border to Frenchmen. Méchain passed his enforced leisure by observing stars in Barcelona, also with exquisite accuracy; but, to complete his misfortunes, the difference in latitude between Montjouy and Barcelona, as deduced from the stars, came out 3.24 seconds greater than the difference Méchain had calculated from measurements made on the ground.^[55] These miserable three seconds tormented Méchain for the rest of his life: he thought that Borda's circle permitted perfection and he blamed himself for blundering. Méchain had measured his angles as exactly as Borda's circle allowed. The discrepancy of 3 seconds—about the angular width of a penny observed at a distance of 450 miles—arose from

unevenness in the terrain, which dragged Méchain's plumb bobs off the vertical.^[56]

While Méchain stagnated in Barcelona, Delambre had one unpleasant adventure after another in the north of France. Anticlerical peasants had knocked down many of the church towers that had served his predecessors; when he hung lanterns as substitute sights, he was suspected of signaling to the enemy. (France had been at war with most of Europe since April 1792.) Once, having been detained by local patriots, he tried to explain his mission in an impromptu lecture on geodesy. To no avail. He was packed off to a higher jurisdiction, in Saint Denis. The square teemed with volunteers waiting to go to the front, who did not have the prerequisites for the crash course in triangulation they forced him to give. "Evening came on. . . . The audience was very large: the front rows heard without understanding; those behind heard less and saw nothing. They grew impatient, and grumbled; some proposed one of those quick means [of dealing with suspect people] then so much in vogue." Were it not for a quick-witted official, who rushed Delambre into protective custody, the arc might have ended in Saint-Denis.

The National Assembly found time while busy transforming France into a Republic, which it declared on 22 September 1792, to issue an order for Delambre's release.^[57] That did not signify a regard for academicians. On 8 August 1793 the National Assembly closed the Academy along with other unrepublican corporations. The suppression came only a week after the Assembly had given cause for reassurance to those who expected that the Academy's labors on measures in the national interest would protect it. That first week in August the Assembly had affirmed the decimal system and the meridianal definition of the meter, ordered the continuation of the work, and decreed that the Academy provide for the manufacture,

distribution, and explanation of provisional meters for general use while it prosecuted its measurements. This provisional meter was defined as a ten-millionth of ninety times the average degree in France as determined by Lacaille, or 443.444 lines of the Peruvian toise. It differed from the definitive meter by about a quarter of a millimeter.

It is not advisable to assign an important job to a specialized government agency one week and to abolish the agency the next. The Assembly therefore immediately accepted the recommendation of the Committee of Public Safety that—because its work would erase the last vestiges of feudal divisions—the Academy's commission on weights and measures should be reestablished, with the same personnel, as an independent temporary commission (Commission temporaire des poids et mesures républicains). It consisted of Borda, Brisson, Cassini, Coulomb, Delambre, Haüy, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Méchain, Monge, and Vandermonde.

The Academy's confidence in metrology as an anchor against political storms thus received partial justification. The job of overseeing the making and distribution of the provisional standards brought another large and pressing public responsibility to the academic rump and an important cash flow. The minimum cost of the standards, as estimated by Lenoir and others, would be some 200,000 livres. This minimum provided for copper standards for the geographical departments into which the Revolution had divided the old provinces and for iron standards for the prefectures. The Assembly preferred to avoid this whiff of discrimination and voted an additional 60,000 livres or so to make all the standards of copper except for the platinum prototypes.^[58] The temporary commission expected the copper standards to be accurate to around one part in 100,000 for the meter and the grave (kilogram) and one part in 10,000 for the pinte (liter).^[59]

The arrangements of August and September proved provisional in more ways than one. Lavoisier was arrested on 28 November 1793; the temporary commission requested his release as necessary to its work; the Committee on Public Safety of the Convention (into which the Assembly had transformed itself on declaring a republic) refused, and, for good measure, purged the temporary commission of Borda, Brisson, Coulomb, Delambre, and Laplace, who had not, in its opinion, shown a proper hatred for kings. The rejection of the appeal for Lavoisier and the order for the purge were drawn up by Prieur, who thus revenged himself on academicians who had opposed his political views and metrological proposals. When news of the purge, which was made public on 23 December 1793, reached Delambre, he was shivering from cold on the top of a signal tower 64 feet tall that he had erected near Orléans in the service of the people. On his return to Paris, a revolutionary committee studied his manuscripts without making much of them and pounced on a diploma from the Royal Society, which bore the arms of George III. Delambre found it prudent to disappear.^[60]

What remained of the temporary commission did little more than print explanations of the new system and revolutionary rhetoric. "Soon [our] vision will no longer be affronted by those old weights and measures that still tell of the odious remains of times and things sullied by tyrants. . . . Every child will know [the system]; and it will help diminish inequality among men."^[61] There is no reason to put off enjoyment of the great benefit; the provisional meter will be perfectly satisfactory for commerce; the definitive will only serve to make the whole operation "more worthy of the powerful and enlightened nation that has undertaken it." Neither the rhetoric nor the practical business of furnishing provisional metersticks long protected the pitiful rump commission. In the spring of 1794, it requested 50,000 livres to pay its artisans; Prieur arranged to give 10,000 and to terminate its existence.^[62]