18
THE EMPIRE OF THE RED OCTAGON
The Second World War left the United States in an extraordinary position. It was rich, it was powerful, and, thanks to its chemists and engineers, it had the means to deal with foreign lands without colonizing them. But the war also conferred another advantage, harder to see and operating on a deeper level. It had to do with standards.
Standards—the protocols by which objects and processes are coordinated—are admittedly one of the most stultifying topics known to humankind. A sample of headlines from the journal Industrial Standardization gives a sense of the exquisite heights to which boredom can be taken:
Industry Approves Recommended List of Paper Sizes
New Law Requires Labels for Wool
Brochure Tells About Building Coordination
Revision of List of Recommended Paper Sizes
How Durable Is Rapid-Hardening Concrete?
American Standards for Wood Poles!
National Unification Settles Questions of Number of Flutes for Reamers and Reamer Tolerances
Tolerances for Cylindrical Fits (a four-part series)
Sheet Labels Now Furnish Much Useful Information
Glass Jars of Recommended Sizes Used for Mayonnaise Products
Agriculture Department Defines “Lard”
And I’ll confess a special fondness for this one:
ASA Approval of Pipe Standards Important Event in Pipe History
It’s easy to chuckle. But were it not for agreements on cylindrical fits and reamer tolerances, it’s hard to know how our world could operate. The more we fill our lives with complex manufactured objects and the more those objects move around, the more important it is that they play well with one another.
In 1904 a massive fire ravaged Baltimore. Engine companies sped from New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmington, and Harrisburg to help. Yet there was little they could do, for when they arrived, they found that their hoses couldn’t connect to Baltimore’s hydrants (or, indeed, to one another’s hoses). For thirty helpless hours they watched as 1,562 buildings burned.
Through the early twentieth century, compatibility failures like that were chronic, and they made any attempt to move between jurisdictions exasperating. A “bushel” of greens weighed ten pounds in North Carolina, thirty in neighboring Tennessee. The standard berry box in Oregon was illegal in California. Every time truckers crossed state lines, they had to pull over to demonstrate that their vehicles conformed to local standards. And they didn’t always. Height, length, and weight allowances varied wildly from state to state, so that the longest permissible truck in Vermont, a 50-footer, was 24.5 feet too long to enter Kentucky.
College football was a popular sport in the 1920s, yet it wasn’t until 1940 that colleges agreed on what a “football” was. Home teams would just supply whatever vaguely football-shaped objects they wanted. Teams that liked to pass used slim balls, teams that emphasized kicking (which early football rules encouraged) proffered short and fat ones.
It wasn’t until 1927 that traffic lights were standardized. Before that, drivers in Manhattan stopped on green, started on yellow, and understood red to mean “caution.” A different system prevailed in Cleveland, a different one in Chicago, a different one in Buffalo, and so on.
It’s easy to ignore standards. But once you start thinking about them, you see them everywhere. You realize how much relies on the silent coordination of extremely complex processes. And you start to earnestly wonder how society can go a day without bridges collapsing, planes dropping from the sky, appliances spontaneously exploding, and everything good burning up in a swelling ball of flame.
In 1900, after the war with Spain, the secretary of the Treasury put the issue of standards before Congress. It was a new world, he argued. Science and technology had made “exceedingly rapid progress,” and the country had just claimed new and far-flung territories. For this growing society to hold together, it would need standards.
Congress agreed and established the National Bureau of Standards. There was a lot of work to do. A few months after the devastating Baltimore conflagration, a fire broke out on the bureau’s grounds. The night watchman rushed to grab hoses—stored in different buildings—to extinguish it. But he encountered the Baltimore problem: the hoses couldn’t connect. He had to stamp out the fire with his feet.
The next day, a bureau employee remembered, “there was quite a discussion.” Even at the Bureau of Standards, hoses from two different buildings couldn’t be coupled.
It’s not hard to appreciate the bureau’s plight. Everybody wanted standards—it’s not as if manufacturers took pride in making incompatible hoses. It’s just that each firm desperately wanted its way of doing things to be the standard way, and for good reason. Losing a standards war meant having to retool, which might require purchasing expensive new machines. It meant seeing one’s existing stock become obsolete. And it meant paying those costs while a competitor—the one whose standard was adopted—got to race ahead unimpeded. With stakes that high, it was easy for firms to get locked into standards battles, leaving hapless firefighters cursing their incompatible hoses.
Resolving these paralyzing disputes was potentially a job for government. It helped that the bureau had, in the 1920s, one of the most trusted public officials at its helm: Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Today Hoover is remembered as the president unfortunate enough to have been in office during the 1929 stock market crash. Yet the popular image of him as a bumbler misses a lot. He may have been a maladroit politician and a poor steward of the economy, but Hoover was an astonishingly capable bureaucrat. And there was little he cared about as much as standardization.
Herbert Hoover, as a man, can best be understood as the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt. Whereas Roosevelt lusted for combat and styled himself as a cowboy, Hoover was a Quaker who had lived for a year among Osages in Indian Country (he later had Charles Curtis, a Native American with Osage heritage, as his vice president). Roosevelt chafed at rules; Hoover once refused to let former president Benjamin Harrison into a college baseball game without a ticket. Roosevelt gave his horse the dramatic name Rain-in-the-Face; Hoover’s animal companion was a cat, whom he addressed as Mr. Cat. And whereas Roosevelt had a lifelong obsession with big game hunting, Hoover’s love was fishing, an activity he revered for its “quieting of hate,” “hushing to ambition,” and promotion of “meekness.”
Perhaps the only thing you need to know about Herbert Hoover is that he wore a jacket and tie to fish.
Hoover made his fortune as an engineer and his fame organizing the relief of Belgium during World War I, an enormous logistical operation that required orchestrating the movement of more than five million tons of food by rail, ship, and canal boat. Though contemplated by both parties as a presidential candidate in 1920, Hoover instead became secretary of commerce. He’d been told by a predecessor that the job required merely turning the lighthouses out at night and putting the fish to bed, but for Hoover it was more than that. It was a calling.
The Great Standardizer: Herbert Hoover, fishing in a starched collar and a suit
As he saw it, the true problem with the economy was neither the injustice of capitalists nor the impatience of workers, but the inefficiency of objects. So much time and money were wasted on things that just didn’t work. Solve that problem, Hoover thought, and there’d be more than enough to go around. Standardizing and simplifying were, in his mind, the keys to prosperity. When he took his position as secretary, he rearranged the Commerce Department to ensure that he’d supervise the Bureau of Standards personally.
Under Hoover, the bureau developed a system. It would call a small group of industrial representatives to Washington, draft a standard based on their conversations, and then call a larger convention, again in Washington, to adopt or, in rare cases, amend the standard. Hoover insisted that the process be voluntary, as he doubted that imposed standards would gain adherents. But the mere act of the government calling an all-industry convention was often enough to secure agreement.
It started with a conference of brickmakers who, after a few hours with Hoover, agreed to reduce sixty-six varieties of paving brick to eleven (and eventually to five). Then came new standards for lumber, cement, doors, wood, steel, bedsprings, mattresses, hospital linen, ball bearings, and brake linings. Glass tumblers, it was decided, had to be able to withstand six hours in boiling water. Tires must have at least 70 percent new rubber on their treads. Red ink had to be a certain proportion of scarlet dye to water.
Hoover’s greatest challenge was one of the least visible: the humble screw thread. Screws, nuts, and bolts are universal fasteners. They function in industrial societies, as one writer put it, like salt and pepper “sprinkled on practically every conceivable kind of apparatus.” Yet every such society encounters, early on, the vexing problem of incompatible screw threads. Different screws have different measurements, including the thread angles. If those don’t line up between the males and the females, you are, so to speak, screwed.
“The screw thread is a simple device,” one senator put it, “but it ties together the whole mechanical skeleton of our civilization.”
Or it doesn’t. For the entire nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, screw threads were at the manufacturer’s discretion. The result was an anarchic profusion of standards and a civilization very much not tied together. A worker, Hoover complained, “had to find a bolt of the same make before he could screw a nut on it and had to search among a hundred different diameters.” And if the manufacturer who made your screws went out of business, good luck.
Screw thread incompatibilities grew even more worrisome with the advent of cars and planes—complex vibrating objects whose failure could mean death. The problem had hobbled the armed forces in the First World War, which led Congress to appoint a National Screw Thread Commission. Still, it took years, until 1924, before the first national screw thread standard was finally published. It wasn’t a big-splash innovation like the Model T or the airplane, but that hard-won screw thread standard quietly accelerated the economy nonetheless.
“Now the half-inch nuts screw onto all the half-inch bolts,” announced a satisfied Herbert Hoover.
Setting standards on the mainland was hard work. It went easier in the territories. There, industrial interest groups were weaker (when they existed at all) and the unelected government felt free to act with greater force. The exhausting business of cajoling manufacturers, calling conferences, and consulting with interested parties could be dispensed with. Authorities just declared standards and enforced them.
The ability of empires to promulgate standards was a major benefit of colonial conquest. Imperial standardization meant that even in faraway lands, the colonizers’ practices would be adhered to. Empires imprinted colonies with new laws, ideas, languages, sports, military conventions, fashions, weights and measures, rules of etiquette, money, and industrial practices. In fact, that’s what colonial officials spent much of their time doing.
There’s a reason, in other words, that the British measurement system (feet, yards, gallons, pounds, tons) is called the imperial system. Those weights and measures were promulgated to secure commensurability throughout Britain’s realm, far beyond the British Isles. Even where local measures were used, they were defined in British terms, such as the Indian measure of mass called the maund, standardized in the nineteenth century to equal a hundred pounds.
Empires standardized people, too. Take nursing in the Philippines. Mainlanders venturing out to the colony needed the attention of nurses, particularly given the diseases that the war had unleashed. And yet, since few mainland nurses were willing to move to the Philippines, that meant relying on Filipinos. Soon after annexation the government began training them.
Nursing wasn’t new to the Philippines. There’d been hospitals in the country for centuries, and nurses had played an important part in the Philippine Revolution (Emilio Aguinaldo’s wife, Doña Hilaria, established a Filipino Red Cross to treat rebel soldiers). But the training the U.S. government offered was designed to aggressively overwrite previous Filipino and Spanish codes. Nursing students were hived off from the general population and placed in special dormitories where they studied English, cooked and ate mainland food, and learned mainland etiquette. They were drilled in mainland notions of hygiene. Sandals were replaced by shoes, long dresses by crisp gingham worn over stockings.
The Philippine schools were essentially satellites of mainland universities. The Philippine Medical School, for instance, copied its curriculum from Johns Hopkins. Promising Filipino nurses were brought to the mainland to study. The result was hospitals staffed not just by trained nurses but by mainland-trained nurses. This allowed freshly arrived mainlanders to fit easily into roles as teachers and supervisors, with little adjustment.
Aligning nursing practices in the Philippines with those of the mainland made the empire run smoother. But it has also had a profound unintended consequence. Once standards are firmly established, they are hard to dislodge, and the Philippines has remained, even after independence, extraordinarily U.S.-centric in its nursing practices. So, as the U.S. population has aged, requiring more health care, and as the Philippine economy has faltered, more and more nurses from the Philippines have left to work in the United States. Today, a massive pipeline carries tens of thousands of Filipino nurses to jobs in U.S. health centers.
At this point, not only are Filipino nurses training in preparation for emigration, but Filipino doctors are retraining as nurses so that they too can find work abroad.
Medical expertise flows out of the country, money flows in. It’s had a mixed effect. But the point here is that the easy flow, which has made the Philippines the United States’ top supplier of foreign nurses since the 1960s, is not the consequence of markets alone. The Philippines has a competitive advantage because of the generations of nurses who learned their craft precisely to U.S. standards.
The half-inch nuts screw onto the half-inch bolts.
Men like Herbert Hoover standardized the mainland. Colonial rulers then imposed those standards on the territories. But both processes stopped at the border. Within the Greater United States, one way of doing things prevailed. Foreign countries had their own nursing practices and screw thread angles.
In Hoover’s day, it was hard to imagine changing that. Getting brick manufacturers in one country to agree had been difficult enough. Who was going to get French brickmakers into agreement with Japanese ones? The difficulty of standardizing across jurisdictions explains why countries through the first half of the twentieth century had largely distinct material cultures.
The First World War drove this point home. The United States sent its troops to Europe. They found, on arriving, that Europeans used different weapons, had a different sizing system for uniforms, and measured distance differently.
They also found that there wasn’t much they could do about it. The U.S. Army was fighting an away game, so it made uncomfortable adjustments. It switched over to the metric system for the war’s duration, manufacturing metric provisions, issuing metric maps, and giving its orders in metric units. Fighting in kilometers and kilograms wasn’t easy for men who’d grown up with miles and pounds, but that was the price of coordinating with their French allies.
Standards clashed again in the Second World War. This time the problem was even worse. This time the United States wasn’t sending only men and money to Europe. It was supplying a relentless torrent of stuff to theaters all over the world.
It was doing this even before it formally entered the war, a practice that Roosevelt strove to justify to a hesitant public. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose,” he argued in a famous analogy. “If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire.”
It was a metaphor, obviously. But it isn’t hard to picture Herbert Hoover in the back of the room, raising his hand. What if your hose doesn’t fit his hydrant?
That would have been a good question to ask. The United States made guns with 0.30-inch cartridges; the British Empire used 0.303-inch cartridges. Similarly, British bombs didn’t fit the racks on U.S. planes. A Canadian naval officer deemed it a “frightful commentary” on the state of international cooperation that at the start of the war, “there was not a single gun or a single round of ammunition” that could be shared among the Allies.
It was even worse than that. The British had adopted a 55-degree thread angle for their screws, whereas the U.S. standard, in which Hoover took so much pride, was 60 degrees. It was as if the things themselves spoke different languages. “We can’t borrow parts from the British,” one U.S. mechanic complained. “We can’t even steal them. They don’t fit.”
In the First World War, which was still fought with horses, industrial incompatibilities among allies had been inconvenient. Now, in a war of jeeps and bombers, they were crippling. When the U.S. manufacturer Packard contracted to make engines for British planes, its engineers spent ten months redrawing some two thousand British blueprints to translate them into the U.S. screw system. Throughout the war, the United States spent $600 million sending spare screws, nuts, and bolts overseas to compensate for the incompatibility.
Wartime poster illustrating the problem with noncompliant parts
Could manufacturers not just adopt European standards, as they had in the last war? Perhaps. The British and French spent $84 million to establish and expand factories in the United States that were capable of making European-style aircraft engines, essentially planting European industrial outposts on U.S. soil. The U.S. Army also adopted some items of the British arsenal as its own and built racks for British bombs.
Yet deferring to European standards only made sense if Europe was the heart of the Allied war economy, and Europe soon lost its centrality. The fall of France and bombing of Britain took European factories off-line. At the same time, U.S. manufacturing kicked into high gear. By the war’s end, the United States had produced 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, and 41 billion rounds of small ammunition. The war against Hitler may have been a European fight, but it was very much made in the U.S.A.
The more U.S. factories made, the more fine-grained their standardization became. The goal, as two prominent experts put it, was “the integration of the entire process into a smooth flow like a great river system.” That meant not just making parts from the same factory interchangeable, but also making them interchangeable across factories, indeed across industries—all of which required mind-boggling levels of precision.
Consider the Fenn Manufacturing company, which produced specialized machinery. Before the war, its vice president explained, no one had ever heard of making parts with tolerances of plus-or-minus 0.0002 inches. Anyone suggesting such precision would have been deemed “absolutely insane.” But that’s what the vast military economy demanded, and Fenn was forced to retool virtually its whole plant. It had to install a constant-temperature room to check fixtures and gauges for minuscule variations.
In Washington, engineers turned out “war standards” with ferocity. It was the same ballet between governmental officials and industrial leaders that Herbert Hoover had choreographed, danced at twice the tempo. Standardizers gamely wrote specifications for new materials, new equipment, and new designs. At its wartime peak in 1944, the budget of the National Bureau of Standards was 7.5 times larger than it had been a decade earlier.
All this turned the United States into the undisputed standard-setter for the Allies. The war had united their economies, but Washington set the terms of the union.
You could see this in Australia. As a British dominion, Australia had adhered to British standards before the war, with some local variations. Yet it didn’t take long for it to tip into the gravity well of the United States’ war economy.
The key period was from 1942 to 1944, after Douglas MacArthur abandoned the Philippines but before the United States could fully provision his troops via the mainland. MacArthur still relied on the United States for ships and weapons, but for high-volume, low-value items such as food and clothing, Australia became the source. At peak, some 15 percent of Australia’s national income came from meeting MacArthur’s procurement orders.
Meeting those orders was a challenge, especially when it came to food. Australian farmers often worked small plots, weeding by hand and selling to local markets. Machines played a small role in crop cultivation, and safety measures such as milk pasteurization were costly luxuries, ill suiting the farmer’s-market milieu of Australian agriculture.
All that would have to change. The United States sent over experts, agricultural missionaries bearing machines, herbicides, and fungicides. Their charge? Transform a continent.
They bombarded farmers with lectures, radio broadcasts, educational films, leaflets, and field demonstrations, all to teach the U.S. way of farming. Australian manufacturers were given models of U.S. tractors, mowers, harvesters, and dusters and taught how to make them. Australian canners learned to can the army way. Dairy farmers were ordered to pasteurize their milk and test their cows for tuberculin. Given the sheer size of MacArthur’s purchase orders, to resist would have been economic suicide.
“Almost every phase of Australia’s food industry has been profoundly affected by the activities of the remarkable team of specialists brought out here for the US to guide and advise us,” wrote one witness to the transformation.
Tastes changed, too. Australian troops used to mutton watched as their U.S. allies consumed much larger rations built around beef, pork, and ham and supplemented with spaghetti, coffee, and eggs. It was decided that serving different rations to different troops would be too dispiriting to the Australians. So they, too, started eating U.S. rations. Australian meat-packers, for their part, got the hang of making new foods: chili con carne, corned beef hash, ham and eggs, luncheon meat, Vienna sausage.
The entire Australian shoe industry was similarly overturned as shoemakers retooled to make shoes in U.S. sizes rather than British ones. With sixty thousand pairs of shoes ordered a month for army use, they couldn’t afford not to.
“Without any inhibitions of any kind,” announced Australia’s prime minister early in the war, “I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” In the realm of standards, that was an unavoidable truth. Politically, Australia remained British. But materially, it looked a lot like a U.S. colony.
Australia was just the start. During the war, the Allies formed a standards coordinating committee with headquarters in New York and London. It oversaw agreements on repair parts for aircraft, the width of rail lines, and radio broadcasting frequencies. Generally, these agreements specified that U.S. standards would be adopted, since the United States’ planes, trains, and radios were essential to the war. In 1943 the British signaled that they were willing to talk screw threads.
A British mission traveled to New York that year. For nearly two weeks, some thirty experts debated screws, pipe threads, gas cylinder threads, hose couplings, and cylindrical fits. Everyone agreed that “unification” of the Anglophone countries was essential. But unification on whose terms? The U.S. representatives suggested that the British Empire retool. The British agreed to think about it.
A longer summit followed in London. Bombs dropped overhead in an “unending stream,” reported the president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Perhaps the bombardment softened the British up. The U.S. delegates had planned to spring the subject of unification on the British at the last moment, but to their surprise the British brought it up immediately. Abandoning 55-degree screws for 60-degree ones would devastate British manufacturers. But given the exigencies of war, they were willing to try it temporarily.
One thread to rule them all: The 1945 standard
A third conference in Ottawa in 1945 clinched the deal. This time the battered British delegates simply surrendered. Britain would wholeheartedly accept a new standard, with a screw thread angle of 60 degrees. British manufacturers would retool. U.S. manufacturers, by contrast, would barely notice the shift, since screws made under the new Anglophone standard were practically interchangeable with screws made under the old national agreement that Herbert Hoover had secured.
It was, as they say, an important event in pipe history.
The same month the Anglophone powers agreed on a screw thread, they established the International Organization for Standardization (better known by its short-form name, ISO). It was to be a United Nations for things. It had an administrative committee modeled after the UN’s Security Council: permanent seats for the five great powers (United States, Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union) and rotating seats for other countries. The first president was from the United States.
One of the first topics ISO discussed was, of course, screw threads. Peace and prosperity called for global unification. But the British refused to revamp again, noting that they had already endured considerable hardship in adopting the 60-degree standard. Nor was the United States open to change. The other powers grumbled that the United States and Britain had “beaten the gun” in international standardization. Still, faced with the combined bulk of the British and U.S. empires, there was little they could do. Bowing to inevitability, they voted overwhelmingly to adopt the Anglophone thread angle as the international one (the Soviet Union was the only member to vote no). Countries could still use their national standards, but if they wanted international compatibility, their screw thread angles would need to be 60 degrees.
Quite a lot of things, in fact, would have to be remade to a metaphorical 60-degree angle. The war had stripped economies down, and now they sought to rebuild themselves by tapping into a world market. Yet that market was dominated by the United States, which accounted for an astonishing 60 percent of the industrialized world’s economic production in 1946. “America is our largest buyer, our largest seller,” noted French standardizers. And so agreement after agreement affirmed the centrality of the United States.
The United States wasn’t just an economic superpower, it was a military one, too. Its vast armed forces had been agents of standardization during the Second World War, and they continued to be so afterward, during the Cold War. Washington flooded the world with its arms and equipment. In accepting them, foreign militaries had to adopt U.S. standards as well.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pushed standardization even further. It established a permanent military alliance of twelve countries, the first of its kind. This alliance turned military standardization from an acute wartime problem into a chronic peacetime one, which NATO administrators solved by going through the supply catalog and, one by one, standardizing items in it. They started with rifles, which were put on the U.S. system of 0.30-inch cartridges. By 1953, the U.S. representative to NATO’s Defense Production Board bragged, fighter planes featuring Belgian engines perfectly fit Dutch frames. A medical standardization program had just begun, too, and he expected that within two or three years “a British stretcher will fit the trolleys of an American ambulance, and a Turkish needle will fit on a French syringe.”
In 1953 the leading British standards journal filled an issue with articles reprinted from its counterpart journal in New York. It was a remarkable capitulation—in standards, the British were now just taking dictation.
The Third World was taking notes, too. Poorer countries found it hard to set standards themselves—laboratories, conferences, and journals cost money—and they had strong incentives to use the standards of their richer trading partners. And so, just as European powers flocked to U.S. standards, their former colonies did the same. U.S. engineers helped by advising foreign governments and staffing overseas field offices for standards associations.
It was a worthwhile investment. By exporting its standards, Harry Truman noted, the United States was “smoothing the flow of international trade” and “enabling buyers and sellers in different nations to speak the same language.” He didn’t need to specify whose language was spoken.
In industry after industry, the world tuned itself to the United States. This happened literally in music, where countries bickered over the pitch of a concert A. The United States had been tuning its instruments to an A of 440 hertz since 1917. But continental Europe was officially tuned to the “French pitch,” a slightly flatter A of 435 hertz, closer to the classical pitches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Austrian delegates pushed for A435 at the United Nations. Yet with U.S. recordings flooding the market and the U.S. government broadcasting a pure A440 tone around the world from powerful radio stations in Maryland and Hawai‘i as a “service” to musicians, the Austrians stood little chance. Today, except for those playing period instruments such as baroque flutes or older church organs, A440 is the law of the land.
Something similar happened in the skies. International aviation relies on standards. Air traffic controllers and pilots must speak the same language, plane parts must be similar enough that repairs can be made in any country, and the world’s radio frequencies must be arranged so that the navigational channels in one country are the same as in the next. Representatives of the U.S. aviation industry worked aggressively to secure all these objectives and to make sure that the language of the air was English. By 1950, they had largely succeeded.
It’s not shocking that aviation is strictly standardized, given its frequently international character. More impressive is what the United States did to ground travel. For the first half of the twentieth century, traffic engineers in the United States had been concerned with securing nationwide standards—traffic light colors, signs, and so forth. Yet in 1953 the deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Public Roads explained that “we now think in terms of world-wide uniformity.”
Worldwide uniformity. Had this been the ambition of a transportation official from, say, Thailand, it would have been laughable. Yet from the United States it was wholly feasible. That year, the international Convention on a Uniform System of Road Signs and Signals reproduced the U.S. practices with remarkable fidelity. Traffic light colors, pavement striping rules, and even to a large degree road signs followed the U.S. system, including the well-known yellow octagon with the word STOP printed on it.
Wait—yellow? Yes. The octagonal stop sign came from Michigan, born when a Detroit police sergeant clipped the corners off a square sign to give it a more distinctive shape. But the early signs were yellow, not red. The first national agreement of U.S. state highway professionals rejected the use of red on any sign, since it was hard to see at night. So the U.S. stop sign, adopted as an international standard in 1953, was yellow.
Yet just a year later, in 1954, the United States changed its mind about the yellow. Experts thought that red better signified danger, and new developments in industrial chemistry allowed for durable, reflective red finishes. So, to what I can only imagine was the apoplectic fury of traffic engineers worldwide, the United States abandoned the global standard—its own standard, designed in Michigan and foisted on the world—and began to replace its yellow signs with red ones.
This, more than anything, showed the stupefying privilege the United States enjoyed in the realm of standards. It could force other countries to adopt its screw thread angle in the name of international cooperation. But it was never bound by those imperatives itself.
This unique exemption from international standards is not a secret. You see it every day in the realm of weights and measures. While other countries have reconciled themselves to the metric system, designed by the French in the late eighteenth century, the United States has held out. As late as 1971, an extraordinary 56 percent of mainlanders claimed to not even be aware of the metric system.
The ongoing U.S. rejection of metric measures leads to frequent annoyance and occasional catastrophe—a Boeing 767 plane carrying dozens that lost power midair because its fuel load had been mistakenly calculated in pounds, a Mars probe that disintegrated because of U.S. software that used pounds rather than kilograms. Although the United States secured worldwide adoption of its screw thread angle, it has squandered part of that advantage by sticking (in some contexts) to screws measured in inches, which aren’t compatible with those measured metrically. Still, the United States has refused to relinquish its inches, pounds, and gallons. It stands with Myanmar, Liberia, the Independent State of Samoa, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands as the sole holdouts against the metric system.
If it is the privilege of the United States to depart from international standards, it has been the burden of the rest of the world to indulge it. Two years after the United States finished switching its stop signs from yellow to red, the United Nations convened a grand meeting of 134 nations to revisit the issue of traffic signs. The yellow octagon was dropped for a red one (an inverted red triangle in a red circle was also given official imprimatur, though few nations chose it). The United States didn’t even sign the new agreement, yet its standard prevailed.
Today, the empire of the red octagon is global. There are minor variations: in Japan it’s a red triangle, in Papua New Guinea it’s a red shield, and in Cuba it’s a red triangle in a red circle. But by my count, at least 91 percent of the world’s population stops at red octagons. Even the North Koreans do.
The stop sign can be added to the list of empire-killing technologies. Taken together, they have had a formidable effect. Synthetics diminished the great powers’ need for strategic raw materials by offering substitutes. Aviation, cryptography, radio, and satellites, meanwhile, enabled those powers to run secure transportation and communication networks without worrying about contiguous territorial access. Innovations in medicine and engineering—such as DDT, antimalarials, plastic-based packaging, and “world-proofed” electronic equipment—further reduced the need for territorial control. They allowed objects and humans to safely travel to hostile terrains, meaning that colonizers didn’t have to soften the ground beforehand.
Standardization, similarly, made foreign places more accessible. Standards had been facilitating long-distance trade for centuries before World War II, of course, but mainly within political jurisdictions. You had to colonize to standardize, roughly speaking (and with important exceptions). What changed in the Second World War was scale. The United States took advantage of its position—as the undisputed economic and political superpower, with its wartime logistical network installed in more than a hundred countries—to push its standards beyond its borders. The wave of U.S.-centered standardization that followed transcended the scale of the nation or the empire. This was standardization at the scale of the planet.
Together with the other empire-killing technologies, global standards changed the rules of the game. Powerful countries had long secured their ability to both claim resources and move around the planet by controlling land. Those were the rules the United States had played by when it expanded westward and overseas. Those were the rules Germany and Japan had played by in the Second World War. By those rules, the end of the war had brought the United States to the dizzying heights of imperial possibility. It had new ambitions and every chance to back those ambitions by seizing territory. Had it done so, it could have locked down a resource base and a strategic position unrivaled in history.
That the United States declined to follow victory with annexations—that instead it decolonized—cannot be explained by a sudden onset of altruism. It was due in part to the revolt of colonized peoples worldwide. It was also due to the lessons learned in the war. Fighting and winning that war had taught Washington the art of projecting power without claiming colonies. New technologies helped it achieve, as a writer in the forties put it, “domination without annexation.”
Those technologies laid the foundation for our world today. It’s a far cry from the world Teddy Roosevelt envisioned, in which the strong violently subdue the weak and take their land. It is much closer to the one Herbert Hoover imagined, held together not by empires, but by the market. It’s a world where the great coordinating process isn’t colonial rule, which operates within borders, but globalization, which crosses them.
The replacement of colonialism with globalization, it should be said, hasn’t exactly leveled the playing field. A previously bumpy world may have become “flat,” as the pundit Thomas L. Friedman has put it. But who flattened it? For the most part, it was the U.S. military, seeking to project power around the planet. Given that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that globalization, at least at first, favored the United States. U.S. planes filled the skies, U.S. broadcasts flooded the airwaves, U.S.-made synthetic goods replaced colonial ones, and U.S. standards held it all together.
Not all those advantages have endured. Today, China makes more plastic than the United States does. Yet even if it has not won every match, the United States has consistently enjoyed a sizable home-court advantage. It has had the luxury of sticking to its ways while forcing other countries to retool their factories and retune their instruments. The benefits of this are many. Yet one sticks out and is worth special examination. That is the global adoption of a single language: English.