Does industrial metrology touch everything?

As I look around my living room that I’m working in, I’m overwhelmed by the number of measurements that have gone into everything that fills this space.

I struggle to find something that has not been subject to metrology and quality assurance. I don’t think it’s possible to not be touching something here that hasn’t been carefully measured and remeasured. Disregarding the structure of the house, probably built in the mid nineties, I’m working on a laptop, wearing clothes made with machines, I’ve got a bookshelf full of mass-printed books and I’m drinking from a branded aluminium mug.

In hopes of finding something that hasn’t been measured, I try to determine what the oldest thing around me is. Some of the furniture is antique and was brought to Europe when we moved here in the late nineties. It could be as old as the Boer War, but this vintage school cabinet’s dovetail joints testify to a carefully measured product. On it sits what I, almost too excitedly, realise is something that has not been measured: a handmade wire-and-bead gecko. It’s one of many that I own and as anyone who has been to South Africa will know, these animals are made laboriously by hand, often by the side of the road, by talented craftsmen using minimal tools. But the exaltation at having found something that lies outside of the bounds of metrology is quickly shattered when I realise that the metal wire, the plastic beads and the glass marble eyes were all manufactured by machines, and thus metrology has touched this as well.

Only yesterday I finished writing an article about the future of metrology, with terms out of science-fiction such as ‘Industry 4.0’ and ‘The Internet of Things,’ I thought it would be a natural step to investigate the past as well. I mentioned in my last post that the origins of metrology lay in arms development. So I’m drawn to the bullet on my bookshelf.

It comes from the First World War and was fired in Flanders. Manufactured en masse as part of the enormous war effort, produced by machines and subject to rigorous quality control. Clearly this one worked. I tried to find some figures on how many bullets were produced or fired during WWI, but it seems that there are no real estimates for these gargantuan numbers. The estimate for the western front is that at least 1.5 billion artillery shells were fired there. For reference, if there was a single cannon firing one shell every second, it would take over forty-seven years to get through 1.5 billion shells. The number of small arms rounds fired is likely to be much higher, to the point where it’s practically impossible to guess.

From a metrology perspective, the scale of the industry behind these numbers are mind-boggling. Every piece of ordnance will have passed a strict selection in the production stage judging whether it was adequate or not. Even if this was done with callipers, compasses, go/no-go gauges or otherwise manual, non-robotic equipment, the systems were in place and were employed on an enormous scale. As my first week has taught me, these processes are now largely digitised, and well on track to be fully automated. Whether it’s with robotic arms mounted with touch probes, laser/light 3D scanners, or industrial X-ray or CT scanners, the world is ever advancing in how to inspect the manufacturing quality of components and products.