AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE METRIC system in our Fall 2002 issue mentioned the Mars Climate Orbiter, which failed to work properly because of a misunderstanding over whether metric or Anglo-American units were being used. Now archeological research has uncovered a much earlier failure caused by the lack of a standard measuring system, one that may have changed the course of history in a very important way.
In 1588 the mighty Spanish Armada sailed for England, planning to land troops and conquer the territory for the Spanish crown. The outnumbered Royal Navy’s stout resistance drove the Armada away, never to return, and for the next four centuries it was all downhill for Spain.
Why did the Armada, seemingly much superior to the English fleet, fail so ignominiously? Historians have attributed the defeat to unfavorable weather, superior English tactics, and poor planning by the Spanish. Now Colin Martin, an archeologist at the University of St. Andrew’s, in Scotland, has uncovered another reason.
In the April 2002 issue of British Archeology , Martin tells how artifacts recovered from the Spanish ships San Juan de Sicilia and La Trinidad Valencera exhibit an appalling, and ultimately fatal, lack of uniformity. He examined rulers and shot gauges, which were used to calculate the proper size and weight of projectiles for a gun’s bore, and found that “devices from both ships are inaccurate in random, different ways.”
Martin explains: “Unrelated weighing and measuring systems were used in different parts of Europe, and the Armada’s guns were a chaotic jumble of types and sizes obtained from many countries. The apparently simple process of matching shot to guns, and distributing the right sizes to each ship, seems to have broken down almost completely.” Many other factors were at work in the Armada’s defeat, but in view of this basic failure, it is unsurprising that “some of the ships which returned [to Spain] had fired less than 25 per cent of the ammunition issued to them.” If not for this fatal inconsistency, you could be reading this magazine in Spanish, a point to remember the next time someone questions the importance of establishing technical standards.
