A Brief History of Koinometry

On the standardization of measurement.

As transportation improved and distant villages grew closer, many cultures started standardizing their systems of measurement to make commerce easier. None, however, went as far in their attempts at unification as the kingdom of Enopolis. Their practice, which historians have come to refer to as Koinometry, was based on a single universal measurement unit called the Metron.

This initially posed some challenges, as it was not immediately clear how, for example, one Metron of time should compare to one Metron of distance. To resolve this, a central institution was charged with adjusting the standard unit to each particular context of use.

To keep numbers in a range that was comfortable to calculate with, the unit was eventually adapted not just to the properties it measured, but also to the objects of which those properties were measured. One Metron of money thus referred to a different amount when buying a house than when buying wine at a tavern, and one Metron of length referred to a different distance when measuring out knitting yarn than when describing astronomical measurements.

The incommensurability of the monetary Metron caused considerable confusion, until a council of experienced metrologists arrived at a straightforward simplification: One Metron of money was henceforth to refer to the price of one Metron of the goods being traded.

Thorne (1827) recounts the example of a merchant greatly expanding their business by offering delivery of one Metron of grain annually to households under a standard agreement, while local government metrologists took care of adapting the unit to regionally prevailing household sizes and dietary customs. In the following decade, grain shortages threatened this arrangement, but since consumption fell along with the bad harvest, the Metron was adjusted and contracts could still be fulfilled.

Practices around the measurement of time are of particular interest. At first, the length of a temporal Metron depended only on what kind of time was being measured. A day of idle time might have measured between 20 and 25 Metrons from sunrise to sunset, whereas a feast of similar duration was usually considered to have lasted two to three.

This was eventually deemed insufficiently precise, as people found that uneventful stretches dragged on but compressed in hindsight, and vice versa. It was therefore decided to make the temporal Metron’s length depend not only on the activity it represented, but also on the perspective, multiplying pleasant Metrons of time after the fact and dividing idle ones. The inactive day would thus turn into about five Metrons a week after the fact, whereas the feast might expand to something around thirty Metrons when looked back on.

Employment agreements were eventually exempted from retrospective adjustments based on subjective experience, as the resulting disagreements proved a great burden on the Enopolitan economy. Unger (1837b) reports repeated discussions of defining temporal Metrons of work in terms of their productivity, but this appears not to have been enacted despite multiple attempts at reform.

Karashima (1912) documents a notable legal dispute involving a worker preparing food at the large wedding of a senior administrator of the metrological academy. The administrator’s marriage unraveled over alleged infidelities after five (contemporaneous; this was later adjusted) Metrons. While retroactive adjustments to the worker’s experience of catering to the guests were explicitly ruled out by employment law, he maintained that the failed marriage should change the duration of the festivities themselves, and demanded a corresponding adjustment to his wages.

Several guests had testified that the festivities now seemed less significant than they did at the time, making them somewhat forgettable. At first glance, one might expect this to lower the worker’s pay, since insignificant time compresses in hindsight, and his shift was thus now shorter than if the marriage had worked out. He argued, however, that what mattered for compensation was the contemporaneous duration, which for insignificant time was considered longer than for joyful occasions. The outcome of the case is not entirely clear from the historical record. Although it is known that a settlement was reached for an amount of two Metrons, the value of this cannot be fully reconstructed based on the available information.

The practice of Koinometry flourished for about five centuries (the most accurate duration in Metrons remains contested among scholars). Eventually, the growing inertia of the increasingly complex governing institution appears to have made the Metron slower to adapt to changing contexts of use, while increased economic and cultural exchange in the region accelerated the pace of cultural change. In consequence, its use began falling out of favor as confusion over its correct application grew and increasingly caused friction.

A variety of informal measurement units appear to have emerged during this period. Notably, some of these aspired to Metron-like generality, whereas others deliberately focused on narrow applications in the hope that this would improve their consistency and make them easier to reason about.

Many of the latter units were exceedingly narrow in scope. One example, reported by Nakamura (1887), is that of a unit of volume to be used only for beer brewed from a specific strain of hops and served at a specific temperature. That temperature was in turn given in another highly specific unit only to be used for the same kind of beer, the non-circular definition of which is thought to have existed at the time but has been lost to history. The government at first tried to maintain conversion tables between many of these units and the Metron, but eventually prohibited their use when this became infeasible due to their rapid proliferation.

The ensuing general discontent nearly culminated in what would have been a devastating war over trade-related disputes between Enopolis and two adjacent city-states. However, armies found themselves facing considerable difficulties accurately measuring distances on maps of enemy territory, which not only used different locally defined units, but also often needed conversion between Metrons used for measuring distances on maps and those used for measuring distances on the ground.

Scouts also often reported the length of marches in temporal Metrons, leading to discrepancies between durations reported by someone who had walked alone and someone marching as part of a large unit. This slowed down advances and thwarted attempted attacks, which won some time for diplomatic negotiations eventually leading to a peaceful resolution.

Hansen (1729) reports that considerable effort went into agreeing on exact borders and terms of trade, as conversion factors into a large variety of units used by neighboring countries had to be worked out and documented. The resulting treaty is notable as the only preserved Enopolitan document whose numbers are interpretable without consulting additional metrological tables.