Georgetown University Professor Dr. Kathryn Olesko will give an invited public lecture online as part of the Trimble Lecture Series at the American Institute of Physics on the geopolitical history of measurement in Prussia. This lecture will take place on 17 February 2021 at 15:00 EST. Registration is free. The full abstract is below:

When we think of geopolitics and science or technology, Cold War nuclear weapons most often come to mind. But in an earlier era measurement itself was a contentious geopolitical issue, one that extended far beyond the now well-known example of the competition to measure longitude in the 18th c. This lecture addresses how state measurement projects led by Prussian physicists and astronomers--including weights and measures, the calendar and time, infrastructure development, and mapping and meridian arcs--from the Seven Years War to just after WWI were transformed by geopolitical considerations further east, including with Silesia, the lands of the Polish Partitions, "Mitteleuropa," and Russia. Over this contentious space, measurement became a political weapon in the hands of nations and empires, one that could unite, meliorate, and modernize, or divide and destroy. The political nature of precision in measurement was not lost on defeated German generals who blamed the loss of the Great War on the imprecision of their maps. The lecture explores and exposes tensions still in evidence today: between on the one hand the centrifugal forces of nation-building, national identity and national secrets, and on the other, the globalization of standards of measurement as they evolved across the nineteenth century.