How long does it take to read The Measure of All Things?
The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World
Ken Alder
The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder takes about 8 hours 33 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 33 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2001. 466 pages, about 128,150 words.
18 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 14 hours 14 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 33 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 20 minutes |
The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In June 1792, the erudite and cosmopolitan Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and the cautious and scrupulous Pierre-Francois-Andre Mechain set out from Paris -- one north to Dunkirk, the other south to Barcelona to calculate the length of the meter. In the face of death threats from village revolutionary councils, superstitious peasants, and civil war, they had only their wits and their letters to each other for support. Their findings would be used to create what we now know as the metric system. Despite their painstaking and Herculean efforts, Mechain made a mistake in his calculations that he covered up. The guilty knowledge of his error drove him to the brink of madness, and in the end, he died in an attempt to correct himself. Only then was his mistake discovered. Delambre decided to seal all evidence of the error in a vault at the Paris Observatory. Two hundred year later, historian Ken Alder discovered the truth. With scintillating prose and wry wit, Alder uses these previously overlooked letters, diaries, and journals to bring to life a remarkable time when everything was open to question and the light of reason made every dream seem possible.
Subjects: History, Arc measures, Meter (Unit), Metric system, Astronomers, Biography
