Documents That Changed the World is an ongoing podcast series by UW Information School Professor Joe Janes that explores the compelling stories of various documents from throughout history.
Janes aims to take things that are less known or appreciated and tell their stories in a slightly different way; to leave people with something new to think about, with a background or perspective they didn’t consider.
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A document that changed the world: The Guinness Book of Records, now styled as Guinness World Records and available online, compiled by Norris and Ross McWhirter and published in London, 1955.
I say - have you ever wondered what the fastest flying species of bird is? We’ve all wondered that, haven’t we, though perhaps not while out grouse hunting. Back in Ye Olden Days, this might have led to silent musing, conversation with like-minded friends, or perhaps the more diligent types would make the effort to try to look it up…somewhere. But where? Or – in most cases – dropped the matter altogether because where in the world would you find such an obscure factoid, and … who really cares?
In Ye Less Olden Days, as you likely know, there was – is – a singular repository of just this sort of thing, with stories of its own to tell, satisfying a world of wonderers, even in an age of instant search and there’s no excuse to be ignorant, begging a number of questions about the nature of superlatives, leaving a record of achievements and bests and mosts and fastests, no matter how trivial they might seem.
A document that changed the world: The Guinness Book of Records, now styled as Guinness World Records and available online, compiled by Norris and Ross McWhirter and published in London, 1955.
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School and I want to thank my student Brooks Scheibler, who researched and collaborated on this episode. The bird question was really how this whole thing started. In November 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver and his party, back at Castleford House after a day’s shooting in the North Slob by the River Slaney in Ireland whatever that is, were in disagreement as to whether the golden plover, of which they had missed several during the day, was in fact Europe’s fastest bird. Reference books they consulted failed to deliver a conclusive answer. Today, wisdom of a sort is a few clicks away. A Google search on “fastest bird Europe” produces, well, we’ll just leave that as an exercise to the listener, not to mention what you might get from a voice assistant or AI or whatever else comes down the pike in the years to come.
For most people, in 1951, the matter would have ended there, with someone remarking “I guess we’ll never know….” before turning once more to the sherry decanter. Sir Hugh, however, wasn’t just any knight of the British realm. He happened to be the managing director of a certain brewing company and it occurred to him that these kinds of disagreements must arise all the time in the 80,000 or so pubs his company owned up and down Britain and Ireland. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to have a book that would resolve these kinds of discussions? (And, although nobody comes out and admits it, that forestalls bar brawls?)
Indeed it would. Twin brothers, Ross and Norris McWhirter, who borrowed each others’ passports, read newspapers and almanacs as kids, and who later separately ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in different constituencies getting almost the same number of votes, were running a fact-finding agency in London. They were engaged in 1954 to compile such a book, after having been recommended by a record-breaking athlete whose first job was with the brewery and who knew the twins as sprinters at Oxford. Since nothing like this existed at the time, one of their first challenges was how to do it, so working over the course of three jampacked months, they sent out letters to experts in various fields, and rather than asking direct questions about superlatives, they would write with something they thought was close and ask about that; they’d discovered over the years that experts might be cagey with their own knowledge but loved correcting somebody else’s mistake. Genius.
Thus was born in August of 1955 the first 198 page version of the Guinness Book of Records; sources differ a bit on its early success, perhaps 1,000 were printed initially as a promotional giveaway, or maybe the first run was 50,000 and started slowly but in any event by Christmas 1955 was #1 on the UK bestsellers list and became a regular resident there and elsewhere for years to come. In the decades that followed, more than 150 million copies have been sold, in 40 languages and there are more than 50,000 “records” in their database. It spawned television shows, museums starting with one in the Empire State Building in 1976, a board game, video games, and inevitably a web site; at time of recording there is still a print version aimed primarily at a youth audience.
They also employ a staff of “adjudicators” who, well, adjudicate whether or not a record has been set or broken – for a price. Nominally, anybody can apply to set or break a record for $5, with a wait time of several weeks; however, if you’re willing and able to pony up for “priority review” or “consultancy” for your corporate branding strategy, ranging anywhere from a few hundred dollars to half a million or more, go to the head of the line. Which means in many ways they are seen as much an advertising or publicity agency as a repository of facts, including accusations of burnishing and whitewashing the reputations of authoritarian regimes with hundreds of “new” and entirely contrived records from the UAE, Egypt, Russia, Turkmenistan, and so on.
They set the rules and the terms of record attempts, so more or less by dint of having been doing this for decades, they have become, more or less, “the” authority. One special case: they rely on the work of the Gerontology Research Group, which since 1990 has undertaken the somewhat macabre task of compiling ever-changing lists for the world’s oldest people. They are not, however, the only game in town; the “World Record Academy” boasts a very colorful website claiming to have faster service, more categories and requirements for polygraph and drug testing.
There are limits; over the years, Guinness (spun off from the brewers when they were bought out in 2001) have “closed” or discontinued categories that are now deemed too dangerous or unsavory or just plain gross to discourage “bad behavior”: those involving alcohol consumption or gluttony including eating things like bicycles and trees, heaviest pets, fastest driving around the world, or potentially environmentally dangerous activities like releasing balloons or paper lanterns. They also won’t take things they can’t objectively measure such as beauty. Also, for the record (sorry, couldn’t resist) – no more entries for most prolific serial killer, fasts or hunger strikes, longest kiss, longest time buried alive, fastest violinist, or the largest audience for camel wrestling (ok, 20,000 in Turkey in 1994 because I know you were dying to know.)
Let’s step back for a moment to consider “world records” – the question of who is the fastest or the strongest or the smartest or whatever must be as old as humanity; the International Olympic Committee lists several “Best of the Best” ancient athletes, but without sophisticated and reliable timekeeping or measurement methods, comparing across the generations is impossible, and if you want a world record, then you sorta have to have knowledge of, and communication with, the “world” in some meaningful fashion. The first citations of the phrase in the OED are from the 1880s and 1890s in the contexts of horse racing and sports, which aligns with the organization and codification of many sports and on the cusp of telegraphy and faster and more global communication methods. It’s likely an old concept that could only be realized in modern times. The first officially-recognized world record in the 100m dash is from 1912 for men and 1923 for women; for swimming 100m freestyle it’s 1905 and 1908, and in some timed or measured sports, financial bonuses from sports federations or sponsors can be on the table for world records.
Almost nobody ever needs to know a world record, like the tallest person or the smallest book or the fastest bird in England (finally revealed in the 36th edition as the red grouse). The continuing popularity of the Guinness Book and now its web site tells us, though, that lots of people care enough to find out or just be fascinated by what people will go through to get themselves a world record, not to mention the people who are fascinated enough with the work itself to produce a very thorough and well-maintained web site devoted entirely to collectors of the published books.
I’ll admit to a marginal personal connection; as the nerdy, facty kid I was, there was usually a Guinness Book in the house when I was growing up, and I remember being deeply freaked out by the photograph of the man with the longest fingernails as I just read through the book for the heck of it. And at the American Library Association conference in 1982, the very first professional meeting I ever went to, I won a free copy at their booth.
So we come down to “who cares?”; if it’s not you or someone you know who’s trying to break a record then so what? Without going too far overboard, this gets at the roots of human curiosity: I wonder…what’s the tallest building, the highest waterfall, the largest cowboy boot sculpture? Yet world records, ridiculous as they might often be, can also at times be among the highest achievements of humanity.
Guinness’ tag line is “Officially Amazing,” in that kind of punny, slogany way. It’s easy to dismiss all this as “trivia” or “trivial” which now connotes things of little worth. The word “trivia” enters English around 1900 by way of 16th century “trivial”, originally meaning “commonplace” morphing into “unimportant” and deriving from the Latin “trivium”, the place where 3 roads meet, and also the term for one of the foundations of medieval university studies, the disciplines of rhetoric, grammar, and logic. In an ever-more-automated world of “facts” true and otherwise, some people still value knowing them; witness the thousands of people, including your genial host, trying every year to get on Jeopardy! (Helloooooo!)
Somehow, a world where getting facts right, and making them – and logic while we’re at it – commonplace seems amazing indeed.
“About Us | World Record Academy.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.worldrecordacademy.org/about-us/about.
Gerontology Research Group – Dr. Coles’ Supercentenarian Institute | Gerontology Research Group. n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.grg-supercentenarians.org/.
“Guinness Book History 1950 - Present.” 2006. May 13. https://web.archive.org/web/20060513093133/http://spyhunter007.com/spy_guinness_book_history.htm.
“Guinness Record Book Collecting.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://guinness.book-of-records.info/history.html.
Guinness World Records. 2015. “60 Years on, the Categories That Guinness World Records No Longer Monitors.” August 26. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2015/8/60-years-on-the-categories-that-guinness-world-records-no-longer-monitors-393758.html.
Guinness World Records. 2022. “Why Was the Guinness World Records Book First Published?” September 16. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2022/9/why-was-the-guinness-world-records-book-first-published-714607.html.
Guinness World Records. n.d. “Guinness World Records Archive.” Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/products/books/history-of-the-book/book-cover-archive.html.
“Guinness World Records Accused of Whitewashing Repressive Regimes.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/guinness-world-records-accused-of-whitewashing-repressive-regimes-images-9bmrg9p6c.
Martin, Douglas. 2000. “David Boehm, 86, Record-Keeper to the World.” Arts. The New York Times, February 10. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/10/arts/david-boehm-86-record-keeper-to-the-world.html.
Saakashvili, Eduard. 2017. “Episode 795: Is Record Breaking Broken?” Planet Money. NPR, September 20. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/20/552203402/episode-795-is-record-breaking-broken.
“The All-Time Greats of the Ancient Olympic Games.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.olympics.com/ioc/ancient-olympic-games/all-time-greats.
“Trivial, Adj. & n. Meanings, Etymology and More | Oxford English Dictionary.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/trivial_adj.
Wikipedia. 2025. “Men’s 100 metres world record progression.” June 26. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Men%27s_100_metres_world_record_progression&oldid=1297465951.
Wikipedia. 2025. “Women’s 100 metres world record progression.” July 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Women%27s_100_metres_world_record_progression&oldid=1298639033.
Wikipedia. 2025. “Guinness World Records.” July 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guinness_World_Records&oldid=1298698517#cite_note-planetmoney-79.
Wikipedia. 2025. “World record progression 100 metres freestyle.” July 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=World_record_progression_100_metres_freestyle&oldid=1298873960.
“World’s Record, n. Meanings, Etymology and More | Oxford English Dictionary.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/worlds-record_n.
Patent #423, granted to Louis Le Prince by the British Patent Office
Who doesn’t love a good Hollywood story? In the 1930s and '40s, there was a vogue for biopics about scientists and inventors: Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Muni won an Oscar for playing Louis Pasteur, Greer Garson was Marie Curie, even Edward G. Robinson got into the act as the Nobel-winning immunologist Dr. Paul Ehrlich, and Spencer Tracy starred in 1940 in Edison, the Man. Diligent workers all, long hours over many years, many obstacles and setbacks, only to win through in the final reel to success and notoriety forever as the score swells over the closing credits. Stirring stuff.
While this isn’t a story about Hollywood, it’s among the first stories about motion pictures – the origin story, if you will – how it all got started and while there are no spoilers here, I can tell you that it does indeed have a classic Hollywood ending – though maybe not quite the one you know or expect.
A document that changed the world: Patent #423, granted to Louis Le Prince by the British Patent Office, 1888
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and I’m joined here by my student Ellianna Thayne, who researched, wrote and produced this episode.
Picture a mahogany box with applewood feet and brass fittings, weighing in at some forty pounds; something you might mistake for an odd side table, if it wasn’t for two lenses peeking out at the front and a reel of film in the back, set on two spools to capture passing images held for exposure behind a brass plate, which is your main indication that this is the first motion picture camera. On the fourteenth of October, 1888, this camera recorded the very first known film in the Roundhay suburb of Leeds, England, featuring the inventor’s son, in-laws, and good friend walking around a garden. The surviving frames – now available on YouTube, of course, constitute a two-second film that stands today as proof that, yes, Louis Le Prince, is indeed the original inventor of the motion picture camera. To which you are likely now saying, “What, who?”
In late 1886, Le Prince files a patent application, US #376,247, titled “Method of and apparatus for producing animated pictures of natural scenery and life”, for a 16-lens system meant, as many early attempts at motion pictures did, to capture photographs in rapid sequence. It also marked the end of his time in New York, where he’d been living with his wife and children; shortly after, Le Prince moved to Leeds – where he’d be closer to benefactors – and on January 10th, 1888, he would submit another patent application, this one in Britain, #423, which claimed: “Improvement in the method of and apparatus for producing animated photographic pictures and that he is the true and first inventor thereof”. This patent was actually written for the 16-lens camera and projection system – but right before he sent it off to the British Patent Office, Le Prince tacked on a provision for his newly-developed single-lense camera and projection system.
The distinction between a 16- and single-lense system gets to the heart of the definition of “film”: Film, as we all know, isn’t just a bunch of pictures taken really fast, it’s a continuous recording from a single point of view, a feat Le Prince achieved after many years of experimentation at his workshop in Leeds.
It’s likely that this interest in cinematography actually began in his childhood; his father was good friends with Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the Daguerreotype, who taught Le Prince about chemistry, art, and photography at his studio. By the time he began submitting patents for his own inventions, Le Prince had completely dedicated his life to discovering the mechanisms that could record and reproduce moving life.
The British patent office accepted Le Prince’s application on the 16th of November, 1888, a month after Edison began work on his own motion-picture device, and, coincidentally we hope, a week after the last of what’s known as the “canonical five” murders of Jack the Ripper. Depositions given to the US consulate, concerning Le Prince’s American patent application, further corroborated his inventorship. James Longley, a mechanic who assisted Le Prince in his workshop, told the consul he’d constructed “an improved camera of one lens for taking Photographs at a great number per minute. I also partly made the delivering machine for throwing the Pictures at the Same rate as taken in the Camera, onto a large white Screen”. Engineer John William Vine confirmed he’d seen this projection device in action in 1889. A friend named Henry Woolf claimed he’d witnessed “exhibited on a screen a moving figure of a man, which gave the impression of life-like movement” back in 1886. Patent secured, Le Prince was ready to share his invention with the world. His wife, Lizzie, organized a public film showing back in Manhattan. On September 16th, 1890, Le Prince said goodbye to his brother before boarding a train from Dijon to Paris, his second-to-last stop before setting off for New York. He was never seen again.
Le Prince’s disappearance baffles still today. Despite the efforts of his friends and family, no evidence has ever been found to indicate whatever fate befell him: no eyewitnesses (despite the fact that he was a striking 6’4” with a distinctive mustache), no body, no deathbed confessions. Sensational theories abound, of course, though none hold water. However, here’s something tangible to chew on: Thomas Edison submitted a “caveat” to the US patent office for a motion-picture camera undeniably similar to Le Prince’s single-lens, mere weeks after he, dare we say, “cinematically” vanished off the face of the earth.
Edison was infamous for his use of caveats to keep his foot in the door of multiple evolving industries. Here’s how it worked: he would file a caveat with a vague description of some new groundbreaking technology. When competitors sent in their full patent applications for the same, or similar, inventions, the patent office would notify Edison, giving him three months to submit his patent application. When he did so, the caveat would establish precedence, and Edison would be declared the original inventor. If that sounds like cheating to you, you’d be right – the United States outlawed the caveat in 1910 under the very same logic.
The most damning part? Edison’s previous designs hadn’t even been close to the mechanism that powered Le Prince’s single-lens. In 1888, when he assigned the work of inventing a motion-picture device to his assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, Edison insisted that a glass cylinder be used as the photographic base for the camera, and that a peephole device be implemented for viewing. By the time his motion-picture “invention” was announced to the public, however, the camera – coined the “Kinetograph” – utilized not a glass cylinder but a roll of celluloid film, and instead of a peephole device he’d created the “Kinetoscope”, a projector. Remember Henry Woolf? When he saw that announcement in The Sun, he reached out to Lizze Le Prince, outraged: this was “an infringement on Le Prince’s machine,” he declared. The United States patent office agreed. They rejected Edison’s first two attempts to patent the Kinetograph, stating: “The claims are anticipated by patents to Le Prince 376247, Jan. 10, 1888”.
Even when the patent was finally accepted in 1893, the fight wasn’t over. William Dickson, the assistant who developed the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope – and unsurprisingly got none of the credit – left Edison’s employment and founded the American Mutoscope Company, a competing enterprise. As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well. Before long the rival companies were engaged in a bitter court case: Equity 6928: Thomas A. Edison vs American Mutoscope Company, with the intention of determining whether “Thomas A. Edison was the original, first and sole inventor or discoverer” of cinematography.
In 1898, a year after Le Prince was legally declared dead, his family became involved in the case. His son Adolphe – who’d featured in the Roundhay Garden Scene as a child – jumped on the opportunity to bring a public spotlight to his father’s inceptive inventorship. The Le Prince family had been trying to advocate on behalf of Louis since his disappearance, but in the mandatory waiting period following his disappearance before he could be declared deceased, they couldn’t take legal action against Edison, nor did they possess the financial or technical abilities to publicise his films. By the time they could take legal management of Le Prince’s patents, Edison and other film pioneers had already dominated the emerging cinema industry. When Adolphe arrived in court, he brought with him his father’s cameras as physical proof and further testimony to support the record of antecedency. Perhaps the most timeline-affirming piece of evidence was the Roundhay Garden Scene, confirmed as predating Edison’s caveat by two years because it featured Le Prince’s sister in-law – who died a matter of days after she was filmed. American Mutoscope, however, walked a fine line. They only wanted to disprove Edison’s claim to originality; if they were to prove Le Prince’s inventorship, they would have to pay his family royalties.
The first motion-picture camera sat just outside the doors of the courtroom as American Mutoscope’s lawyers cunningly manipulated Adolphe’s testimony to their own ends. The case did not end in the reestablishment of Le Prince’s primacy. The resolution, reached in 1901, declared Edison the first and sole inventor of motion picture camera. A court of appeals overturned that ruling in 1902, but Adolphe didn’t live to see it. Regardless, the overturning did nothing to rescue the acclaim his father deserved, nor did it halt Edison’s supremacy over cinematography. Patents, as the Le Prince family tragically discovered, do not decide inventorship, contra their purpose. Even the courts that handle patenting disputes cannot rule on legacy – only those with the influence to sway the court of public opinion can do that. The names we remember today are cemented by foundations of publicity, not patent files gathering dust on the shelves of history. Yet, the people of Leeds, where Le Prince’s workshop once flickered with the future of film, never forgot him. In 1930, the Lord Mayor erected a bronze memorial plate in his honor. It reads: “Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince had a workshop on this site where he made a one-lens camera and with it photographed animated pictures. He also made a projecting machine and this initiated the art of kinemetography.”
Doesn’t this feel like a movie? The inventor going missing, the dead sister-in-law, the courtroom battle with the camera just outside the door, powerful forces depriving the plucky true creator of his due, even Jack the Ripper as a cameo, all very appropriately cinematic; it’d be a great part for Bradley Cooper, Greta Gerwig could direct. In reality, this isn’t a story about one document, it’s 2, no wait, 3 – hang on, 4: the camera, the patent, the first film, and the caveat, which eventually won through. And there’s your Hollywood ending: not the vindication of the hero, but rather the triumph of money and power – and name recognition – winning through as it so often seems to do.
“Blog | Life, Mystery and Legacy of Louis Le Prince.” n.d. Accessed July 21, 2025. https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/pQLAwcB/blog---life--mystery-and-legacy-of-louis-le-prince.
Casey, Kieron. 2013. “The Mystery of Louis Le Prince | National Science and Media Museum.” National Science and Media Museum Blog, August 29. https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/louis-le-prince-created-the-first-ever-moving-pictures/.
Greenblatt, Leah. 2022. “He Created the First Known Movie. Then He Vanished.” Books. The New York Times, April 14. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/books/review/man-who-invented-motion-pictures-paul-fischer.html.
Howells, Richard. 2006. “Louis Le Prince: The Body of Evidence.” Screen 47 (2): 179–200. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjl015.
The Mètre des Archives, a bar of solid platinum, forged and officially adopted by the Convention in Paris in 1799.
“How far did you say it was again? A couple of blocks, more or less?” Picture us, wandering the streets of Paris, looking for a stone shelf set into a wall, across from the Luxembourg Gardens, 36 rue Vaugirard to be exact, on a warm summer’s afternoon several years ago. I’d read about it and it seemed like one of those quirky things one does on vacation when you can’t stand Yet Another Cathedral. So my dutiful husband follows me around – love may not always be blind, though it is patient – and eventually we find it, and thus the picture of me standing next to the last remaining original mètre étalon, a standard meter installed in 1796 to enable citizens to calibrate their own measuring devices.
Now after a couple of centuries of wear and tear, that meter is pretty rough now, and while it sufficed, it was never terribly precise, and certainly not as precise as the standard meter that came after that, or the one after that, or the one after that, or the one after that. This is a not-terribly-long story about a not-terribly-short stick that took about a century to have implications far and wide, once almost everybody agreed on it.
A document that changed the world: The Mètre des Archives, a bar of solid platinum, forged and officially adopted by the Convention in Paris, 1799
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and if you’re the sort of person who thinks that “I love you, a bushel and a peck” is insufficiently specific, you’ve come to the right place. Bushels and pecks are but 2 of the hundreds and thousands of units of measurement invented since time immemorial. Linear and area measurements likely came first; one book on metrology lists 63 historical examples in its index, acres, cords, fathoms, furlongs, rods, thumbs, yards, 8 different kinds of cubit, a whole bunch you’ve never heard of, and of course feet, which are obvious because, well, most of us have them and there they are, and much the same could be said for lots of early measurements based on the proportions of the human body. But – which body, or more to the point, whose? Egyptian “standard” cubits, used for reference in building, were based on the length of the pharaoh’s arm from elbow to tip of middle finger, plus the span of his hand; the yard derived from the length of King Henry I’s arm; his great-grandson Henry III established the weight of a penny to be 32 grains of wheat, taken from the middle of the ear, and an ounce to be 20 pennies, and 12 ounces make the London pound. Got it? Many of these standards were established by edict or decree and some were “published” in a sense: We have Egyptian royal cubits made of wood, and a Roman foot made of bronze, there was a set of metal weights established by Charlemagne. Some emerged from everyday, often local, practice; areas were often measured in terms of how much land could be plowed and by a man with an ox in a given day, and thus might be different in size for different crops and in different places.
As you might have guessed, our story takes us back to France, in this case Revolutionary France which was, um, revolutionary – and not exclusively in political terms, but we’ll get there shortly. July 14 of 1789 the Bastille falls; 3 weeks later, on the 4th of August, the new National Assembly abolishes the feudal system, which meant that the collection of over 700 units of measurement often used for fraud and abuse effectively went with it, so yay for liberty but what do we do now? No less a figure than Talleyrand, the notorious side-switcher, then a bishop who had supported the appropriation of church property, eventually to lead the French delegation to the Congress of Vienna, was asked to propose a complete overhaul, meant to unite the world in sweeping away all traditional measures, based first on the period of the swing of a pendulum.
That didn’t fly, but the Assembly did eventually settle on a decimal system – very much in vogue as they also implemented a new calendar with new months, weeks of 10 days of 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds, for real – defining a “meter” (from the Greek for “measure”) as 1/10,000,000th of the meridian distance through Paris from the North Pole to the Equator, perhaps because that was roughly half the size of the existing medieval toise, the span of a man’s 2 arms. A standard iron toise was embedded in the wall of the Grand Chatelet by the 14th century and the refined Toise of Peru – really – was made official in 1766.
Louis XVI, still alive and sort of reigning, though in prison, approves this plan in June of 1791, his last free official act, the day before his ill-fated attempt to flee the country with Marie-Antoinette. Many twists and turns follow, first among which is how in the heck do you determine that meridional distance? Answer: send out 2 surveyors in 1792 with a complex plan to measure from Dunkirk to Barcelona, starting in Paris and headed in opposite directions. Which was a breeze, except for the imprisonments, the technical problems, the mountains, the political upheaval, the accidents and near-fatal injuries, the battlefronts, and the fact that one of them made meticulous and scrupulous notes and measurements and the other one didn’t, which meant that errors were baked into his numbers from the word go and he knew it but didn’t know how or why and didn’t want to admit it until his wife came along to help sort it out, kind of. Oops.
1793, the Terror grips Paris; Louis is executed in January, many scientists and thinkers follow for being insufficiently “revolutionary”. Bread riots break out in April of 1795 and within the week, the Convention formally adopts and mandates the metric system in the law of 18 Germinal, year III, with a motto no less: “For all times. For all peoples.” Very noble – though they acted not so much out of a sense of rationality, order and universality as desperately trying to control hyperinflation and save their own skins. Which didn’t work – they were overrun by new food riots within the month, but the deed was done. Bear in mind – the survey was still going on, and would continue for another 3 years, so they made a guess with a provisional version which got plonked on the wall we found.
Many more complications later, they finally defined something official based on the survey (which used 2-toise measuring sticks, by the way), in the form of a bar of pure platinum, which was forged by a formal royal goldsmith coaxed back from hiding to be the standard and placed in the National Archives – hence the name – in 1799, mimicking that familiar centuries-old physical toise standard. It’s 25mm wide and 4 mm deep and is – or was - exactly 1 meter in length, by definition, meaning that, that particular thing, was “the meter” and everything else needed to be gauged to that object, not because it meant or represented anything inherently, but because it was made for that purpose; it’s the idea of the thing and the actuality of the thing itself that establishes what the “standard” is.
It’s not, any more, partially because physical objects change no matter how carefully they’re kept, and finally fixing the errors in the original calculations required adding .2mm to the definition, approved in 1872 by the International Metre Commission, in Paris of course, and further meetings of almost entirely Western national representatives led to the Treaty of the Metre in 1875 (Paris again) and the establishment of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, guardians of the system to this very day. New prototypes were fabricated in 1889; the US got number 27 in a lottery, and that was the official American standard until 1960, now sitting in a museum at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland.
All fixed, yes? No. “The people” did not embrace this wonder of rationality for the reasons people don’t like change – these newfangled things are unfamiliar, we don’t understand it, why are we doing this, and it takes work, many other processes and functions have to change too. They didn’t like the new measures or the new names. So the meter gets new-old names to make adoption easier in 1800, which failed, even Napoleon gave up on them in 1809, permitting the use of older and more familiar measures; Louis XVIII bans the metric units outright in 1816, Louis-Phillippe reverses that in 1837 and in 1840, finally, finally, the meter is the meter, whatever it is. Except – it isn’t; it’s since been re-re-defined, in terms of the wavelength of krypton-86, and now, now – at time of recording - 1/299,792,458th of the distance traveled by light in a vacuum. A clumsy, decidedly unlovable definition, still for all times, for all people as the motto remains, even though removed from all human experience or reference.
Now, they tell us, it’s all settled, one nice tidy package, the Système international, integrated, seamless, you’re welcome, the metre and its cousins the second, the kilogram, the ampere, the kelvin, and mole and candela, and so many of our processes, devices, and lives are bound up by increasingly precise measurement that it’s hard to imagine any dramatic revolutionary – heh – overhaul, and yet the drive for precision goes on, no matter how minuscule or seemingly meaningless the refinement may seen.
The meter as we have it is the result of untold mistakes, errors, political intrusions and intrigues, and misadventures, which matter, but really don’t because no matter how you get there, there you are – the meter is the meter because everybody says, so and more or less agrees and it looks more or less like half of a centuries-old French rod and that is that.
Creating and articulating a standard, of anything, is relatively easy; communicating it is harder, and getting people to agree, and use it, and give up the old ways, is harder still, which is Americans have 2 liter soda bottles and grams of sodium on nutritional labels and used to have 35mm photographic film and that’s about it, although, even our old ones have succumbed; the yard for instance is now officially 0.9144m. So it goes.
The metric system was meant to be divorced from any particular culture and based solely on rationality and Nature, capital N. But you can’t remove the meter, or any measure, from its social and historical context, and the only way for a measure to be universal is if you do or at least pretend to. The meter is what it is because it emerged from Revolutionary France; if some other system had been invented, adopted, promulgated somewhere, somewhen else – it’d be different, but the net effect would be effectively nothing, because the standard is the standard…more or less.
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———. The Measure of the World. Dibner Library Lecture. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 2003.
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“History of the Metre.” In Wikipedia, May 15, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_metre&oldid=1223990942.
“How France Created the Metric System.” Accessed July 4, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180923-how-france-created-the-metric-system.
“International System of Units.” In Wikipedia, June 30, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=International_System_of_Units&oldid=1231739470.
McDonald, Daniel McLean. The Origins of Metrology: Collected Papers of Dr. Daniel McLean McDonald. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1992.
———. The Origins of Metrology: Collected Papers of Dr. Daniel McLean McDonald. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1992.
“Meter.” NIST, May 9, 2019. https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/meter.
Williams, Jeffrey H. Defining and Measuring Nature: The Make of All Things. IOP Concise Physics. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2014.
Winchester, Simon. “Galileo, Krypton, and How the True and Accurate Meter Came to Be.” Wired. Accessed July 4, 2024. https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-the-perfectionists-history-meter/.
World in the Balance : The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement - University of Washington. Accessed July 4, 2024. https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma99123279030001452&context=L&vid=01ALLIANCE_UW:UW&lang=en&search_scope=UW_EVERYTHING&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=UW_default&query=any,contains,world%20in%20the%20balance%20crease&offset=0.
The ancient text is a repertoire of about 200 spells meant to assist the newly departed soul in its perilous travels to get to an afterlife of comfort and plenty.
Can we please just stop and ask for directions? I know, it’s a cliché, and less relevant in our modern world with sophisticated GPS, digital mapping tools and apps, and so on, but it wasn’t so long ago that road maps and atlases and helpful gas station attendants were vital parts of making your way in new or unfamiliar territory. And guides of all sorts, from books to websites to word of mouth on social media, can also help to clue travelers in to local customs and lingo.
There’s one journey, though, that everybody takes sooner or later, but nobody comes back to tell us how it’s going; the ultimate journey, to “[t]he undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveler returns” as Hamlet has it. The desire to know, and be ready for, what awaits us there, and moreover how to get there safely, has occupied a great deal of human thought and also yielded a work of exacting detail, surprising flexibility, and just the right word at just the right time.
A document that changed the world: “The Book of Going Forth by Day”, known more commonly today as “The Book of the Dead”, a set of spells and images from Egyptian funerary equipment, by about 1600 BCE.
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School. The Book of the Dead was having something of a cultural moment in the late ‘70s when I was growing up, occupying much the same territory as horoscopes, crystals, amulets, tarot cards, auras, seances and the like. I think it’s the name, which you gotta admit is really cool, even if it’s made-up 19th century German. The culture, religion and mystique of ancient Egypt has fascinated for millennia from the Romans to today with TV shows still trying to figure out who or what killed King Tut, umpteen mummy movies back to 1899, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra (may Isis forgive us), “Walk Like an Egyptian” and even the staggeringly awful Gods of Egypt movie. There’s something compelling, dare we say spellbinding, about their civilization, art, and mythology. Think about it – why is the Washington Monument an obelisk of all things?
What we now know as the “Book of the Dead” is many things, but it’s not a book in any contemporary sense of the word. It’s better described as a corpus, a repertoire of about 200 spells meant to assist the newly departed soul in its perilous travels to get to an afterlife of comfort and plenty. It’s part of a genre called “mortuary literature” and has its origins in earlier forms, starting with Pyramid Texts as far back as 2300 BCE actually written on the walls of royal pyramids, sometimes with intentionally mutilated characters to prevent harm; these evolved into Coffin Texts, so named because they were written on the insides of coffins.
Around 1700 BCE, sarcophagi changed from rectangular to more human shapes, which might have left less room for interior writing, and that might have led to the adoption of papyrus, a writing material already in use for over a millennium, yielding the plentiful examples we now know of. Over time, these too evolved, from the hieroglyphic writing we associate with Ancient Egypt to the more readable hieratic script and the increasing addition of images which were equally potent in achieving the desired effects. These papyri survived in large part because the dry desert climate helped to preserve them, though there are examples stained with, um, fluids from the mummified remains they were buried with, often placed in direct contact with the bodies, presumably for easy access.
The Egyptians believed that the only way to Duat, the underworld, was through the tomb, and that rituals both in life and in death were necessary to get there. The newly-deceased would have to make a perilous journey, passing through a series of gateways or portals guarded by fearsome beasts, demons, and gods, and facing a number of challenges and questions along the way, requiring precise and correct answers at each stage, which the spells were meant to provide, so having them at the ready was critical in making it through successfully. Spells could protect you against dangerous animals, allow you to breathe or drink, or transform your physical form as necessary, reflecting their belief in magic, the power of both the written and spoken word.
After employing dozens of these preparatory and protective spells, providing detailed intel on the specific names of gates and their guardians, the deceased would arrive for the Declaration of Innocence at the Hall of Two Truths, facing a panel of 42 judges presided over by Osiris, god of the underworld. Here Spell 125 would have you covered, so you could correctly name each of the assessors and perform the Negative Confession, swearing your innocence to a long list of possible sins and crimes, including murder, blasphemy, cruelty, profiteering, adultery, impatience, tampering with weights or slaying sacred cattle. At this point, your heart, which they saw as the essence of a person and the seat of mind and intellect, which would remember what you did in life, would be weighed against a feather representing truth; one of the most-discussed spells, number 30, directs the heart not to rat you out, literally not to make your name stink, which could come in quite handy indeed for many of us. Failure at any stage meant an eternity of isolation, dishonor and degradation, including the eating of excrement (ewww), perpetual thirst, or being thrown into a lake of fire or devoured by wild beasts. Passing the test on the other hand led to paradise, a bountiful and successful afterlife, filled with eating, drinking, sex – and work, though burial figures known as ushabti would handily come to life to do that for you.
Now, here’s the thing that gets me. This has got to be the highest stakes journey you could imagine, one wrong move or word and it’s the dunghill for dinner forever. And there’s lots of redundancy in the system, in addition to spells on the walls and insides of sarcophagi, there are examples on leather, stelae, even on the mummifying linen bandages themselves so the deceased would literally be wrapped in the spells; others are intended to be inscribed on scarabs or magical bricks. But – and this is a pretty monumental but – of all the many examples which have been studied, no two appear to be identical.
There is, apparently, no canonical or definitive version; each person – and let’s be clear that this is an elite and exclusive practice reserved for people who could afford it all, maybe 10% of the population at best – got to pick their own from an evolving corpus of options and possibilities. There are commonalities and patterns, to be sure, but there is great variation in content and length, ranging from scraps with a handful of spells to scrolls up to 40m in length. The choices of which spells to include and in what order appear to be purposeful and carefully considered, rather than merely random, though it’s unclear by which criteria these decisions were made, economic perhaps, or personal preference? I have to say, for something this important in a culture so fixated on a successful afterlife as well as the peace of mind of the living, it’s astonishing that some of these practices seem idiosyncratic and apparently that was not only ok, but more or less the norm.
Scrolls were probably created in temple scriptoria by teams of professionals, some of whom focused on images, others on text, not entirely unlike some modern comic books or graphic novels; scholars estimate a good quality version could be produced in a week or two, though the quicker option for your dearly beloved on the go is a more or less off-the-rack version, with spaces left for names to be written in, including some instances where the characters needed to be stretched out or squeezed in to fit and even some with the names still blank which might have caused some red faces in front of Osiris. A “decorated” one might cost you the equivalent of a half year of a workman’s wage, or the price of 3 donkeys.
A typical scroll often has a blank papyrus sheaf attached to the outside for protection, is 20-40cm wide, and highly structured, primarily using black ink, with red for headings, openings, and names of dangerous animals; there are regular margins, framing lines, and fields for images which were increasingly prevalent over the centuries, so we know that great care was taken with these though little evidence of practice or training versions has been uncovered, and master copies are quite rare. The practice continued through several periods and dynasties, eventually starting to fade out by the turn of the Common Era as the Greeks and Romans entered the scene.
We owe that super cool name to Karl Richard Lepsius, described as the founder of German Egyptology, who apparently named it “Tötenbuch”, perhaps from the Arabic term used by villagers to describe tomb papyri. I won’t attempt the name by which the Egyptians knew it, translating roughly into “The Book of Going Forth by Day,” reinforcing that the soul isn’t trapped in the tomb, can move, and go into the daylight as they so fervently hoped. Lepsius published the first translation with the still-used numbering system in 1842, followed by comparative edition by the Swiss scholar Edouard Naville, who crafted a more or less “complete” version of each of the many dozens of spells, with variations. This work took nearly 10 years, supplemented by vignettes drawn by his wife Marguerite [Naville]. At first, spells would have been drawn or transcribed for publication by hand, using tracing paper; then a metal movable type set was created. Now, as you’d expect, there are digital fonts, and hieroglyphic characters have their own Unicode points, created in 2009, nestling right between Cypro-Minoan cuneiform and Anatolian hieroglyphs. Research continues; the most recent complete version, the first in a century, was found in 2022 at the Saqqara necropolis near Cairo.
It is possible – that they had it right, and those who survived the beasts and labryinths and judgment are enjoying the fruits of the bountiful and eternal afterlife they anticipated. We tend to think of ancient Egypt as unchanging, stable, as rigid as the poses in their paintings and as monolithic as the pyramids and obelisks, and, let’s be fair, the pharaonic period endured more than 10 times as long as the United States has. Yet not only did this practice evolve over a couple of millennia, they were remarkably flexible about the specific form.
Many writers compare the Book to a travel guide, which is fine, though I would also suggest it’s an odd hybrid – not unlike a crocodile-headed god, with a password manager or better still those little post-it notes you’re not supposed to have next to your computer that remind you of what codes you need to access what, equally valuable in navigating the traps and pitfalls of the modern world.
When your time comes, I might suggest you could do worse than start with Spell 9: “I have opened up every path which is in the sky and on earth, for I am the well-beloved son of my father Osiris. I am noble, I am a spirit, I am equipped; O all you gods and all you spirits, prepare a path for me.”
Emily Post's name became synonymous with etiquette for most of the 20th century after the release of her definitive guide to good manners.
Oh dear, which fork am I supposed to use? It seems have forever been concocting rules about what to do and not to do in social situations, and thinking badly of others for breaking or not knowing those rules which aren’t written down but everybody else seems to know, and which are either engraved in stone or change by the day, and often wind up becoming exclusive: if you know, you’re in and if you don’t, you’re not. So many forks.
If only we had some sort of guide, a gracious hand gently chaperoning us through the minefield of social customs and mores, leavened with common sense, egalitarianism, and just a soupçon of dry wit, helping us all to be at our best and at our ease in any situation, better company, and better versions of ourselves and our societies.
A document that changed the world: “Etiquette in Society, in Business, and at Home”, written by Mrs. Emily Post, 1922.
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and when you think of “etiquette” – the word comes directly from the French for “ticket” – you likely think of other words like “manners” or “decorum” or “civility” (living in a city), a code of appropriate, proper, correct, polite behavior and deportment, the “right way” to do things; in short, the rules. It might also bring to mind situations where you felt awkward or out of place, uncertain or unaware of what to do and afraid of making a mistake; in short, a clod. And forks, somehow forks always come up.
As ever, guides to such things go way back: Confucius wrote about social relationships, Renaissance books of courtesies (how to behave at a royal court), even a 3rd millennium BCE Egyptian work stressing the importance of virtues like kindness, truthfulness, not speaking down to others, and laugh at the boss’ jokes, really. Table manners come up in Eccleasticus, don’t wolf your food and don’t reach for anything first. Manners and behavior have been studied from sociological, anthropological, hygienic and even evolutionary perspectives, and consider for just a moment the various situations and places where a particular kind of etiquette can be involved: going to a movie or concert or religious service, while driving or walking, at work, even on an escalator, or in sports; winning a point in tennis with a ball that hits the net cord and bounces funny should prompt a brief wave/fauxpology, which nobody believes but if you don’t do it people get tetchy. And for those of you who’ve not experienced a men’s restroom, if there’s only one person in there and you take the urinal next to them, it’s weird.
So, it’s everywhere; lucky we are then to have had a guide, in the personage of Emily Post, whose name became synonymous with etiquette for most of the 20th century as the phrase “according to Emily Post” took hold. She had exactly the kind of upbringing you would expect from an etiquette maven. Born in Baltimore likely in October of 1872, to an architect who designed luxury communities and the daughter of a coal baron, educated first at home and then at Miss Graham’s finishing school; married at 20 to a stockbroker she met on the night of her debut in society, living in Washington Square with a country home. Idyllic. Until, that is, she dumped and divorced him in 1905 because he was being blackmailed for affairs with chorus girls. These things happen in the best of families.
She took to writing once her sons went off to boarding schools; newspaper and magazine articles, a few novels and a travel book about a road trip to San Francisco. Over her lifetime, the story of how she came to write The Book of Etiquette grew grander, that she had to have her arm twisted by the editor of Vanity Fair repeatedly after he casually suggested it at a dinner party; she said she thought the topic was boring and beneath her. That’s a great story, though not entirely true as we know from a letter to her literary agent 9 years earlier asking him to get her a gig writing a column on the subject, which she got.
A little context is important here; this dinner party takes place in early 1920: World War I and the flu pandemic have just ended, Prohibition has just started, women are on the cusp of earning hard-fought voting rights, and many groups of people are searching for the right ways to find their way in the world: recent immigrants, returned soldiers and their wives looking to further their careers and family situations, and the nouveaux riches who wanted to look a little less nouveaux. The then-current standby book is a fusty and musty two-volume tome that presupposed wealth and status and was filled with lots of piddly rules and details, and books of etiquette had been pouring out and very popular for decades. Writing something new and fresh would be a public service, Emily, how about it?
Though her sons tried to talk her out of it, she did. Writing in longhand at her father’s drafting table, she drew on examples and experiences from her own life, reaching out to friends and even strangers for their perspectives, working every day except Sundays, organizing and categorizing, and eventually delivering a quarter-million word manuscript in early 1922, yielding a 627 page book, bound in royal blue, and selling for a rather grand $4 (upwards of $50 today); word of mouth cut through the glut of competitors and it sold far beyond the publisher’s modest first print run of 5,000 copies, getting to 50,000 and a second printing within 6 months, along with syndication rights. By the time she died in 1960 it had gone through 89 printings in 10 revised editions.
In form, it’s often described as a “manual” which is sorta right – that connotes a kind of reference with rules, or instructions like for a car or appliance, not necessarily meant to be read straight through. There are “rules” here, though not laid out as for a sport or game, these are the kind that are enforced by withering stares or whispers leading to social ruin, literally “unspoken” but nonetheless expected to be known.
Emily throws open the French doors and lets everybody in on the secrets, and for my money, her book was a hit resulting from two sources of genius: she made it accessible and she made it fun. Her fiction background came in handy, as the book is populated with a wide cast of characters from the snooty Gildings to the understanding Kindharts, grandiose Mrs. Worldly and the Richan Vulgars, among others. The juicy dedication adds a little guessing-game fun too: “To you my friends whose identity in these pages is veiled in fictional disguise it is but fitting that I dedicate this book”.
There’s tons of advice and warnings and guidance and whatnot on dozens of matters many familiar today: introductions, social occasions and invitations, weddings, funerals, writing letters, as well as the arcana of debutante balls, paying calls, chaperons, afternoon teas and summer homes. However, a lot of it boils down to a couple of simple basics: Make the other person comfortable, put them at their ease. She had no patience for put-on airs, rudeness, pretention, and what she termed “the omniscience of the very rich”.
One of her central concepts was “Best Society” which sounds very la-di-da but she casts it egalitarian tones: “Best Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth; but it is an association of gentle-folk, of which… charm of manner… and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members”
Ever seeking broader audiences – her daughter-in-law once remarked she always sought to be the center of attention – Emily became a radio star, appearing on multiple programs and networks several times a week throughout the 1930’s. Pearl Harbor knocked Emily and many others off the radio, understandably, though her column continued to thrive with 5 million readers and she produced a “War-Time Supplement” for a 1942 edition, highlighting necessary and sensible changes to conventions and behavior, reinforcing that “etiquette is not a fixed subject”: approving of women writing anonymous letters to soldiers, managing rushed weddings and honeymoons, hospitality without waste with smaller portions at mealtime, and carrying your own saccharin with you in time of sugar rationing.
More poignantly, don’t pepper returning veterans with questions about the war, getting a job, being home – let them raise the topics themselves when they’re ready. And in a special section on espionage, she warns against unfounded or hasty suspicions or accusations of foreigners, advice that sadly fell on too many deaf ears. A later postwar revision urges consideration for disabled veterans in a section called, typically frankly, “How to Treat Them”: “What are we going to do and say when they leave the hospitals and take their places in the world for which they have given so much?…don’t stare, don’t point, don’t make personal remarks”. It all worked, thousands of copies sold weekly during and after the war, and it was one of the most requested books for USO clubs.
Life magazine twice named her one of the most important Americans of the 20th century, another put her second to Eleanor Roosevelt as most the powerful woman in America in 1950, she was on a postage stamp in 1998, heck, she was in a Jeopardy! clue last night, and though I have to officially frown on this, Etiquette was reportedly second only to the Bible as the most stolen book from public libraries.
Etiquette is, a century on, in its 19th edition, now overseen by two of her great-great-grandchildren, and the Emily Post Institute continues her tradition of adapting and translating for the times, dispensing wisdom on unfriending, how to celebrate major Jewish and Islamic holidays, online gaming (trash talking is ok in the spirit of fun), “please” and “thank you” in sign language, social social distancing, and, God help us, Zoom meetings. Their podcast “Awesome Etiquette” is worth a listen.
We must now return to the most pressing matter: forks. Emily’s New York Times obituary has you covered: “If you picked up the wrong fork, there was a possibility that your hostess was wrong in having too many forks.” Ever gracious, ever trying to put everyone at their ease, she would have loved that.
When all is said and done in the convoluted process of American presidential elections, hundreds speak for the tens of millions who vote — and in the end it’s a set of documents that speak for us all, for the record.
Everybody’s heard the saying “one person, one vote,” right? Deep down we all know better, far from it, through various notions of who qualifies as a "person” and who gets to vote and yet still we say it. Elections are the mechanism by which those persons — people — have their say, and, ultimately, speak. When all is said and done in the convoluted process of American presidential elections, hundreds speak for the tens of millions who vote — and in the end it’s a set of documents that speak for us all, for the record.
A document that changed the world: the set of materials produced in support of the work of the 59th Electoral College vote, 2020.
I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School, and if you’re looking to go into the deepest, darkest, nerdiest electoral weeds, you’ve come to the right place. Our focus here is exclusively on the mechanics and the materials that make it all work. I lived in New York state for my first election and remember being sternly advised that if I wanted to write in a presidential candidate, I would have to actually write in the names of all the electors for that candidate, and even though I really hadn’t been thinking about it that would’ve put me right off. We all probably know by now that there are only a few hundred people who get to directly vote for president and vice president of the United States, the electors who the rest of us vote for, knowingly or otherwise, who gather to cast their votes typically in state capitals a few weeks later.
Those sessions, when the electors put pen to paper and perform the true act of voting for president and vice president, are meant to be ceremonial, proscribed, almost ritualistic, but all those steps and all those documents play important roles. So yes, there’s all the rigmarole and signing of very stiff looking pieces of paper — and I’m here to tell you, well then what happens, after the ceremonies, or for that matter before, what makes it work? What do those papers say? Into the weeds we go.
We’ve all grown accustomed to watching the election night returns like they were sporting events, where the score is always displayed on the TV screen and we wait for Al Michaels or Mary Carrillo to tell us the final score when the game is over. (Fun fact, sports require final reports too.) We all see the numbers pile up but the networks don’t get to decide or declare who wins, no matter how obvious it might be. The steps that follow and the papers that record those steps make it real, legal, permanent, in one of the most basic functions of a document: to document.
A great deal of what happens is spelled out in multiple provisions of the Constitution, starting with Article II, Section 1, later revised in ways small and large by no fewer than 10 subsequent amendments ranging from the 12th in 1804 creating separated votes for president and vice president, through a number of suffrage expansions by race, “servitude,” sex and age; additional details for filling vacancies; term limits; granting electoral votes to the District of Columbia, abolition of poll taxes; and the quite rococo processes of the 25th Amendment around vacancies and the disability of the president. No aspect of the Constitution has been amended more times than by which the office of the presidency is assumed. Furthermore, U.S. Code Title 3, Chapter 1 fleshes out more specifics, with precursor legislation that goes back to 1887, based largely on the still disputed electoral debacle of 1876.
While most people know the electoral college exists and more or less what it does, far fewer likely know critical roles played by the National Archives. As the keeper of the nation’s official records, the Archives facilitates coordination with all the states and the Congress. They produce and publish a handy guide for state officials, including a checklist of about two dozen steps from identifying a contact person for ongoing communication to keeping the tracking number when the appropriate certificates are sent out.
Each state is responsible for running its elections in its own way, subject to provisions of the Constitution and federal law. Two sets of documents are required for presidential election, following state certification of the final results. The first are Certificates of Ascertainment, in which the governor lists the names of the electors chosen by the voters and the number of votes each of them has received. These must be hand signed by the governor and bear the state seal. Nine of the certificates are prepared, three sent as soon as possible to the Archives and six waiting for the actual vote of the electors.
Which is where the second set of documents come in, the Certificates of Vote. When the electors meet, they must each cast individual signed separate ballots for president and vice president. The votes are tallied — typically a matter of no great suspense, though the issue of “faithless electors,” who go rogue and vote for somebody other than the winner of the state popular vote, has become sufficiently bothersome that a majority of states now have some law fining or disqualifying faithless electors. Once that’s all settled, each elector signs six Certificates of Vote listing all persons who received electoral votes for both offices and the number of votes.
There are no federal standards for how these certificates should look, though they may not include names of any people who did not receive votes and must all be signed by all electors. This leads to a quite charming range of examples from the deeply elaborate with lots of exotic gothic fonts and border frippery to straightforward and frankly disappointing word-processed documents that might just as easily be recording next year’s Rotary president. They also feature closing phrases like “In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the State of Washington to be affixed” or some such exorbitant language; these are called “eschatochols,” descendants of medieval charters and are much the same as any notary public would use. Plain or fancy, they do the job.
These are paired with the remaining Certificates of Ascertainment, sealed up and distributed: two to the Archivist of the United States, two to the Secretary of State of the state, one to the chief judge of the Federal District Court where the electors have met, and the one that really matters, to the President of the Senate (the sitting vice president), by registered mail no less. If those certificates don’t get to the President of the Senate or the Archivist within about nine days they are then directed by law to request the relevant state’s Secretary of State to immediately send their copies and moreover to send a “special messenger” to the local federal district judge to fetch the ones they have by “the most expeditious method available,” and if that messenger neglects their duty there’s a $1,000 fine. Whew.
Presuming that all works out, there is then a joint session of Congress where the President of the Senate opens all the sealed certificates, in alphabetical order, reads them out and tellers — usually chairs and ranking members of Senate and House administrations committees — tally the final votes. This process is often expedited, with the envelopes being opened and passed in short order dispensing with a reading of the formal language. In 1997, this all took 24 minutes; in 2013, 23 minutes; in 2017, 41 minutes.
Federal law spells out several provisions regarding the Congressional session and disposition of any potential objections to one or more states’ votes. Nominally this could be as a result of questions of authenticity of the documents themselves including the possibility of multiple certificates from the same state, either by two different state authorities making different determinations, no determination by any state authority, or the receipt of some extraneous certificate not from the recognized system laid out in that state’s law. In practice this process, requiring objection from at least one member from each house, has been invoked only twice since the original 1887 federal law was enacted, in both cases by Democrats; in 1969, when an elector from North Carolina faithlessly but legally voted for George Wallace rather than Richard Nixon; and in 2005, when objections were made to voting irregularities in Ohio. In each case, the individual houses debated per the law and rejected the objections.
The 1961 counting of the 1960 election, decided by a razor thin popular vote majority but a substantial electoral majority, provided the spectacle of then VP Nixon presiding over the count of the election he lost to John Kennedy. In a gruesome twist of fate, Hawaii, voting in its first presidential election, was sufficiently close that two sets of electoral votes were submitted to meet the deadlines; the final count after Christmas showed Kennedy winning by 115 votes, and Nixon unilaterally suggested ruling in favor of the Democratic slate of electors, “so as not to delay the count,” which was agreed to by unanimous consent. That must have stung.
This is one of the simplest, if not necessarily the most straightforward, of document stories, or at least it should be and yet in times of stress or doubt or confusion, even or perhaps especially in a digital, streaming, cloud-based world, these pieces of paper, documents are there to provide clarity. All the steps and signatures and seals and rules and laws and forms and ceremonies confer heft, seriousness, reality, officialness to the documents and to the process and results. Those other five official backup copies are only required to be maintained for a year, though I suspect mostly they’re kept forever as an enduring record of one of the most pivotal decisions a democracy can make.
One often hears that “the system” has worked: the political system, the electoral system, the legal system, whatever. True, but — those systems don’t, won’t, can’t work without information systems and more specifically documents and information objects to reinforce and bolster the processes and procedures. Otherwise, it’s all just talk, no matter how many other people try to have their say.
Sources:
“Arizona Group’s Fake Electors Try to Cast 11 Electoral Votes for Trump.” Accessed January 3, 2021.
National Archives. “For State Officials,” November 14, 2019.
National Archives. “Instructions and Guidance for State Officials and Points of Contact,” July 27, 2020.
National Archives. “Key Dates and Events for State Officials and Points of Contact,” July 27, 2020.
Neale, Thomas. “The Electoral College: A 2020 Presidential Election Timeline.” Congressional Research Service, October 22, 2020.
Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration. “The 2020 Presidential Election: Provisions of the Constitution and U.S. Code.” National Archives and Records Administration, July 2020.
Rybicki, Elizabeth. “Counting Electoral Votes: An Overview of Procedures at the Joint Session, Including Objections by Members of Congress.” Congressional Research Service, December 8, 2020.
Shoenberger, Elisa. “What Do Archivists Have to Do with the Presidential Election?” Library Journal. Accessed January 3, 2021.
“The Electoral College.” Accessed January 3, 2021.
“United States Electoral College.” In Wikipedia, December 31, 2020.
“U.S.C. Title 3 - THE PRESIDENT.” Accessed January 3, 2021.
