Measurement, work and industry in Lord Kelvin's Britain / M. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith.
Abstract:
"Lord Kelvin's Britain refers here to the consistent vision of an industrialized empire that transformed plain William Thomson into Sir William and thence into Lord Kelvin. We shall tie together...Pierre Duhem's caricature of British theorizing, particularly Thomson's, as representative of a factory mentality, and Thomson's own perception of measurement as the root of all scientific understanding...We show how measurement expressed Thomson's most cherished ideals of progress, mixing together 'value' as the numerical value of a quantity and 'value' as economic and moral value."
Historical studies in the physical and biological sciences Vol. 17 (1986), p. 147-173