James Vincent

The flood​ of images is inescapable. Pick up your phone or surf the web and you will be immersed in pictures of war-torn cities and grinning politicians; friends’ holidays and strangers’ parties; heavenly salads and impish kittens. Yet despite their numbing infinite variety, these images all owe their sharpness and vibrancy to the legacy of a single photograph: a picture of a naked woman in a cluttered attic, a straw hat with feather trim worn at a rakish angle, face turned back over her shoulder to fix the camera with a bright, enigmatic eye.

This journey from a medieval to a modern understanding of measurement is long, complex and muddled. It’s not helped by the fact that a great number of books on the history of measurement take the form of a glossary, listing as many archaic units as possible.