He was associated with Henry Williams Chisholm and others as a member of the Royal Commission of1868-1869for standardizing weights and measures.
Besides the State departments dealing with weights and measures, there are other standardizing institutions of recent date.
Here is carried out the work of standardizing measuring instruments of various sorts in use by manufacturers, the determination of physical constants and the testing of materials.
In the measurement of woollen and other textile fabrics, as to quality, strength, number of threads, &c., there exists at Bradford a voluntary standardizing institution known as the Conditioning House (Bradford Corporation Act 1887), the work of which has been extended to a chemical analysis of fabrics.
More attention seems to have been given to the matter in the United States of America and in Germany and Russia than in England, but the infinite variety of samples known to the commercial expert, and the impossibility of standardizing those in such a manner as to make readily recognizable what the chemist has treated, renders most of the recorded analyses of uncertain value.