Standards for electrical measurement

Precise electrical measurements are of fundamental importance to modern science and industry. This is true not only in the communication and power fields but in many other areas where the flexibility and convenience of electrical methods have made them almost indispensable for the measurement of nonelectrical quantities. Thus, while in textbooks energy is defined simply in terms of force and length or of mass and velocity, in actual practice the heat energy of fuels and the energy output of prime movers are universally measured to high precision by electrical methods. Likewise, the basic electrical units enter into the determination of nearly all the fundamental atomic constants, as well as into daily measurements of heat, light, color, strain, acceleration, displacement, and chemical properties.