The writer is a systems engineer and author of ‘Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World’
In 1525, Albrecht Dürer published Underweysung der Messung [A Manual of Measurement], a treatise that taught artisans how to measure and why it mattered. Today, numbers swarm unbidden from your phone — steps, likes, shares, scores — while the craft of measurement has atrophied.
Dürer wrote for working hands that lived by precision: painters, goldsmiths, stonemasons and carpenters. When a line ran a hair too long, it wasted silver; a misjudged angle doomed a joint. He offered a method, starting with straight lines and advancing through curves and spirals to perspective and lettering, culminating in solid polyhedra. The geometry descended from Euclid but Dürer helped organise it. Printed in vernacular German rather than Latin when the printing press was barely seventy years old, the treatise raced through workshops, making measurement portable, repeatable and, in the spirit of the Reformation, available to all.