Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1884 — INVENTION OF SCALES. [ARTICLE]

INVENTION OF SCALES.

Weights and Measures of tlie Ancients. In the ancient Egyptian belief the hearts of all the dead were weighed before Osiris in the Hall of Perfect Justice, and a papyrus representing the ritual for the dead, preserved in the British Museum, pictures the ceremony of the weighing “for good or evil,” and incidentally affords an excellent view of the Scales of earJy Egypt. In these scales Ihe balance l>eam is neither suspended by tlie center, as in the modern form, nor after tlu form of the steelyard, but is arranged with a shifting fulcrum, the adjustment of which shows the difference between the weights of two objects. The weights used were of metal in the form of rings, and it may be said in general that this was the prevailing type of all early weights. These scales, it will be observed, are by no means of the simplest form, or that which would naturally first suggest itself to mankind, and this fact argnes the employment and gradual improvement of weighing apparatus long anterior to the date of this papyrus (1350 B. O.). We have no knowledge of their earliest invention or forms. The discovery of their uses has been attributed

many geniuses, ana doubtless with something of truth in tbe individual caees. Pliny credits them to Phidon of Argos, Gelling says that Palamedes invented them, and a host of writers following in their wake, each crowns his own particular inventor with the honor. Among others Juno noun* oat the am, and Vulcan claims The scab - as the jnst product of his flames. But certain it is that they hare been known and tried from time immemorial. Their known existence, however, dates back very far, and puts to the blush the fictitious origins attributed to them. When in 1860 B. C., Abraham weighed out 400 shekels of silver ss consideration for the first real estate transfer of which history makes mention, he need them, and they are frequently referred to in the Bible, in Zechariah, Leviticus, etc. The earliest tfcales were temporary, simply a beam balance in a stirrup, the weights being arbitrary and varied, thongh, as above stated, usually in the form of metal rings. In ancient Egypt they were strictly under the superintendence of the priesthood, and so continued until that people came under the Roman sway. They were kept in the public markets, as was also the practice in Greece and modern Egypt. The larger scales were constructed on the same principle of the beam and stirrup, Avith the addition of a fiat board or platform suspended from each end of the beam bv four ropes or chains. In all scales accuracy and the quality of turning under the slightest possible inequality in balancing weights are the highest desideratum, and so great has been the perfection obtained by means of knife edges and agate planes in some of the finer scales that the declaration to Shylock that * * * If the scale turn But In the estimation of a hair. Thou dtest, would be robbed of its terror. The English mint is said to possess a scale which turns at a 1-9000000 of the weigh ing capacity. In all ages the scale# have been th« emblems of justice, and it is to bv hoped that the latter has kept pace Avith the improvements of its emblem.— ln dustrial World.