We begin with Eratosthenes, a Greek astronomer of ancient times.
We conclude with David Suetterlein, the Republican state senator from Roanoke County.
Those are not two names usually found in connection with one another, but both science and politics can sometimes take funny turns.
Eratosthenes and Suetterlein, more than two millennia apart, share one thing in common: Both have tried to measure the earth.
Eratosthenes used a stick. Suetterlein has used a bill that has passed the General Assembly and now heads to Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Let’s start with Eratosthenes, because he has a crater on the moon named after him and Suetterlein does not. Eratosthenes was born in modern-day Libya in 276 B.C., although no one knew to call it that then. Greeks, and Greek civilization, were all over the eastern Mediterranean in those days and Cyrene, Eratosthenes’ hometown, was considered a center of Greek learning, particularly in medicine and architecture. Think of Cyrene as a college town of its day.
A promising student, Eratosthenes was sent off to Athens, for further study — the equivalent of a star pupil going on to the Ivy League today. Eratosthenes was a Renaissance man long before the actual Renaissance. He studied astronomy, literature, math and musical theory. He wrote books, one that looked at the math behind Plato’s philosophy, another that organized the dates of important events, starting with the Trojan War. He made a catalog of the stars and invented a calendar with leap years. He compiled a list of all the winners of the Olympic Games. If Eratosthenes were around today, he’d probably be a stathead with a guest spot on ESPN to talk about the statistical rankings of various athletes. In baseball, ERA stands for earned run average, a measurement of pitchers, but the marketing opportunities for a tie-in with Eratosthenes would be too good. Instead, his friends at the time had to settle for nicknaming him Pentathlos, meaning an athlete who is good at five different sports.
Eratosthenes’ poetry was so good, and so famous, that the Egyptian pharaoh recruited him to become a librarian at the Library of Alexandria, back when government leaders liked to brag about promoting such things. In a few years, Eratosthenes became the chief librarian — and tutor to the pharaoh’s children. The Library of Alexandria faced competition from the Library of Pergamum, in modern-day Turkey. Eratosthenes worked to make sure this upstart did not eclipse the reputation of the Library of Alexandria. The pharaoh’s reputation was on the line, too. Eratosthenes expanded the library’s collection. He devoted a whole section of the library to the work of Homer; he acquired original works by the playwrights Aeschylus, Euripedes, Sophocles. That was the classical equivalent of obtaining handwritten lyrics by Taylor Swift.
None of this really pertains to Suetterlein’s bill but it’s interesting, and you’re still reading, so we’ll continue. Eratosthenes was a buddy of Archimedes, who is said to have first figured out the math behind pi, and argued with Aristotle over the nature of humanity. Aristotle divided the world into Greeks and barbarians; Eratosthenes thought there was some good in everyone. Aristotle was MGGA — Make Greece Great Again. Erathosthenes might have been woke, but let’s not go there.
The reason we remember Eratosthenes today is because of his curiosity about sunlight and shadows. He heard that on the summer solstice, the sun shone directly down into the bottom of wells in the town of Syene (near the modern-day Aswan Dam in southern Egypt). He also knew that didn’t happen in Alexandria. On midsummer’s day, Eratosthenes used a stick (or, by some accounts, a pole), which he stuck in the ground in Alexandria. At midday, it cast a shadow. Eratosthenes measured it. Knowing (or least hearing) there was no shadow at midday in Syene, Eratosthenes did some fancy math (without a calculator!) and came up with a measurement for how big the earth was. Scholars at the time had already figured out that the earth was round, they just didn’t know how big it was. Eratosthenes figured that out and he was pretty darned close — he was off by less than 1%.
Over the years, the units of measurements have changed — Eratosthenes used something called a “stradia,” which was based on the length of a man’s stride — but their importance has not. In George Washington’s first State of the Union address, he urged Congress to do many things — to pass a law authorizing the naturalization of immigrants (it did) and set up a national university (it didn’t). He also urged Congress to pass some laws regulating weights and measurements.
Now, you may think we Americans stick to the good old measurements of inches, feet and yards and not that new-fangled metric nonsense. You’re wrong. Back in 1866, Congress — then under Republicans, if you’re keeping political score — legalized use of the metric system. They just didn’t mandate it as the official system of measurement. In 1875, under President Ulysses Grant, the United States signed the Treaty of the Metre to create international supervision of a metric system of weights and measures. Then in 1893 the Superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey declared that the United States would follow the metric system — sort of.
The practical effect was that from then on the United States officially measured our “imperial system” in metric terms. We kept using feet but the foot was no longer 12 inches, it was 1,200/3,937 of a meter.
None of this matters if you’re sticking a household ruler in the snow to figure out how much snow you got, but does if you’re involved in highly precise measurements This unit of measure came to be known as “the survey foot.”
That survey foot is expressed as a fraction — that 1,200/3,937 of a meter. That was good enough for 1893 but not for the space age. In 1959, the National Bureau of Standards redefined the foot in decimal places — 0.3048 of a meter.
The difference: The international foot is shorter. You have to go out to the sixth place to find that difference, but when you get there you see that the international foot is 0.999998 of a survey foot.
That’s not enough to matter to most of us. But if you’re measuring really big things — the Earth, for instance — that difference can add up to a few feet here or there. And that’s where things start to get tricky in the modern age.
Since 1959, people who measure things for a living — surveyors and architects, for instance — have been toggling back and forth between two different systems, as the need arose. “We have chaos,” an official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told The Washington Times in 2019. “We have a mess.” He related a story about a contractor who was designing a building near a major airport (he wouldn’t say which one). The contractor measured in survey feet; the locality measured in international feet. “The confusion over the two different feet caused delays, extra cost and redesign of the building to be one floor shorter,” The Washington Times reported. That same confusion also caused problems in designing California’s high-speed rail system and a bridge in Oregon.
That year, NOAA and the National Institute of Standards mandated that the United States start using international feet come 2022. Government moves slowly, though. Virginia state code still has language requiring the survey foot. That’s what Suetterlein’s bill is about: It would update state code to conform with the national usage of the international foot.
How did Suetterlein wind up being the senator to boot the survey foot? The Virginia Department of Transportation asked him to. He sits on the Senate Transportation Committee and has carried scientifically technical bills before. In 2018, he patroned a measure to define “the ESInet point of interconnection” as the standard for how phone companies handle 911 calls. Suetterlein recalls that when he appeared before the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee, the chairman said: “I have no idea what your bill does but all the telephone companies say we need it to get E-911. I hope you got it right because none of us understand it.” (Suetterlein did, and that’s how E911 systems work today.)
When Suetterlein appeared before the same committee this year to present his bill, this is how he explained it: “This is how we measure the earth in the commonwealth, the best part of the earth.”
Some ignored Eratosthenes, including a fellow named Christopher Columbus. He thought Eratosthenes’ math was wrong. It wasn’t. If Columbus had paid attention to Eratosthenes, he’d have realized that he wasn’t in Asia but only halfway there. Columbus Day honors a man who ignored math.
Virginia legislators did not make that same mistake when they took up Suetterlein’s bill. They passed it unanimously.
The odds are this will be one of the many bills that Youngkin signs without any ceremony. In a more perfect world, however, there would be a ceremony — at midday with a stick in the ground outside the State Capitol measuring the shadow of the sun.
In this week’s West of the Capital
We publish a weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons. This week, we’ll have:
- A closer look at this week’s Roanoke College poll on the governor’s race.
- Handicapping the dynamics of the new three-way Republican race for governor.
- Sen. Tim Kaine visits Finland.
- Rep. John McGuire’s first bill.
- Rural Democrats want party to give them more attention.
- A trivia question and more.
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