How Standards Became Documents: Uniform Screw Threads and Standardization in the Age of Industrial Print

In the nineteenth century, the process of creating standards became part of a burgeoning engineering print culture. Long before their institutionalization in standards institutes in the early twentieth century, standards evolved into a print genre-one that has remained largely invisible in historical accounts. This article recovers this print history of standards. I argue that in Joseph Whitworth's On an Uniform System of Screw Threads (1841) the genre coalesces dialogically. It descended from eighteenth-century engineering reports that documented completed works, and it contended with contemporary engineering papers that conveyed experimental results or derived best practices. In proposing a potential consensus for manufacturing screws to uniform specifications, the genre assumed the print dissemination of a standard could serve as a collective and public path towards a standard. At the same time, its rhetorical structure aimed to present the standard not as a prescription but as a record of existing practice.