Setting the Standard

In May 1886, American railroads completed the largest coordinated industrial operation the country had seen. Over two days, work crews across the South pulled up thousands of miles of track and relaid it three inches closer together, converting the region’s idiosyncratic gauge to match the rest of the country. The process was planned, organized, and executed in less time than most tech companies take to schedule a product launch. The southern railroads had resisted this change for decades because the incompatibility was not an accident. Different gauges meant that northern rolling stock could not run on southern track, so freight crossing a gauge boundary had to be unloaded, transferred, and reloaded. Every cargo shipment lost time and money at the border, and that money went to the carriers who controlled the boundary. The technical choice was a market weapon. A technical standard is an agreement about how things connect. The value of having a standard usually far exceeds the value…