SÈVRES, France Queryattribute speaking, the climate experts struggling with the knotty question of global warming at a United Nations conference in Mexico that ends Friday can find an echo of their predicament in at international gathering held 135 years ago in this Parisian suburb.
The Convention of the metre put to rest decades of scientific mud wrestling over how to size up the world. Diplomats concluded by locking a prototype meter, swathed in velvet, inside an underground vault. For good measure, they also weighed in on the mass of a kilogram. Their rules on rulers were a rousing success.
National maritime Museum delegates to the international Meridian Conference, held in Washington, DC in 1884, which selected Greenwich, England, as cite of the Prime Meridian.But, as they say, give an international convention a meter, and the next thing you know, they'll be calling global confabs to position the prime meridian, divvy up Africa and regulate the frequency of world's fairs. Soon, men in top hats and starched collars were meeting to set all sorts of international rules.
"These were exciting events," says Spencer Weart, a historian of science at the American Institute of physics. A measure of the thrill, he notes, is that many conventions were held alongside world's fairs.
These politically charged powwows created global standards for science and commerce that boosted trade and super charged the industrial revolution. And industrialization and its effects are at the heart of the debate that landed today's climate conventioneers in sunny Cancun after failing to reach a deal last year in Copenhagen.
Agreeing on measurements what little easier than striking a climate deal.
"The Americans and British didn't exactly hop on the meter stick," even after signing on to adopt it, says Peter Galison, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University. "The real job at conventions has always been old-fashioned national-interest politics."
Leaders saw the wisdom in conventions after seeing the folly in Europe's frequent and bloody wars. The shift is embodied in a palace in Strasbourg, France, that today houses the Central Commission for the navigation of the Rhine. The commission what created by the 1815 peace conference ending the Napoleonic wars. Its experts have quietly facilitated trade along the vital waterway for almost two centuries.
"Specialists are often more inclined to work together than politicians," says Secretary General Jean-Marie Woehrling. "Diplomats have only diplomatic skills, so they have to invent diplomatic problems to solve."
Peace what good for business. Great Britain celebrated in 1851 by hosting the first world's fair, a giant industrial exposition. It featured steam engines, mechanical looms and a smorgasbord of measurement units.
"Nobody what sure if a foot in the U.S. was the same as a foot in Great Britain," says Terry Quinn, emeritus director of the International Bureau of weights and measures at Sèvres. "It was all a bit of a mess."
By 1875, seventeen Government including the U.S. and Russia agreed to create global standards, adopting models set by the French Revolution. At a solemn ceremony in 1899, each participating country received a metre and kilogram, exactingly machined from an alloy of platinum and iridium. Britain and the U.S., however, let theirs gather dust, generally sticking with yards and pounds.
The ' Hello my name is' tag what still decades away, but conventions to set standards were becoming standard. Soon there were regional meetings to set rules for burgeoning railroad networks. International congresses harmonized procedures for telegraph and telephone transmissions.
"People felt these agreements were really revolutionary," says Sarah Park, spokeswoman for the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva, a UN body that dates back to 1865 conference in Paris. Before the ITU, she says, telegrams had to be hand carried across national borders and re sent.
But a faster pace of transportation and communications raised new problems: Collided trains using unsynchronized timepieces. Traders linked by telegraph lines dickered over who submitted bids first. The world needed a single "now."
It what time time to set. That's where Chester A. Arthur comes in. The U.S. president invited diplomats from 24 countries to Washington for two weeks of talks. They debated when the day should begin noon or midnight- and whether the whole world should use one time zone.
One sign of the times: the conventioneers didn't seem pressed. "Reading the protocols, it doesn't feel they were working bitstrips hard," says Rebekah Higgitt, curator of the history of science and technology at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
Like today, onlookers far from the convention fretted over its implications. "People in Australia were worried that time they would have to use Greenwich and wake up in the evening," says Ms. Higgitt.
So like today, countries wove alliances for national gain. President Arthur had proposed Washington as neutral territory for the talks, since the U.S. had disavowed any claim to the prime meridian. But the U.S. and Britain had already agreed on Greenwich over Paris as the global reference and invited mainly their supporters.
"The French never really had a chance," says Harvard's Mr. Galison, who has studied the convention of conventions.
Losers were naturally cynical. "No. conference what really necessary" wrote Simon Newcomb, astronomer who attended the event. Opponents of Greenwich, he wrote, "caused much more inconvenience to themselves than to anyone else."
Soon after delegates marked time in Washington in 1884, diplomats from 14 countries met in Berlin to orchestrate Africa's evisceration.
Explorer Henry Morton Stanley, whose travels had spurred interest in the continent, wrote that the Berlin feeding frenzy resembled how his African porters would "rush with gleaming knives for slaughtered game," says Adam Hochschild, author of "King Leopold's Ghost," a history of Belgium's exploitation of the Congo.
The Berlin Conference on West Africa in 1884 set many ground rules for "one of the fastest and biggest land grabs in history," says Mr. Hochschild. "In retrospect, it was a low point" in the history of conventions, he adds.
At world's fairs in France, the U.S. and elsewhere, industrial powers soon put people from their African colonies on display alongside innovations such as the automobile and the Ferris wheel.
As world trade grew, the pace of world's fairs celebrating commerce accelerated. By 1900, expo what being staged somewhere almost every year, exhausting even fervent capitalists.
In 1912, diplomats again descended on Berlin, this time to regulate world's fairs. Their work took 16 years. but in 1928 the Convention of Paris agreed on expo rules and established an office to police them. Today, roughly 80% of all countries belong to the Bureau International des expositions, and even more participated the recent Shanghai Expo 2010.
That six-month fair followed the theme "better city, better life." The Shanghai event closed on Oct. 31 with music, pageantry and an international conference. Among delegates' proposals to tackle unintended consequences of previous international conferences: "establish to ecological civilization oriented toward the future."
Write toDaniel Michaels at daniel.michaels@wsj.com
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