Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Scarth Bay ·
Schedule of the Salt Weighing
The weigh-house salt totals agree to the gram every Tuesday since 1961, through balances that cannot agree on anything else.
- filed: "Quarter, second sitting"
- reference: "SB/CW/51"
1. Report for the quarter second sitting, customs weigh-house, Scarth Bay, concerning the Tuesday schedule of salt weighings, kept under this reference since 1961 and continued without break through two changes of master, one change of building wall and four changes of chief clerk.
2. The schedule weighs fourteen brine tubs every Tuesday, first light, on the main beam before the office admits the fishing fleet. The tubs come up the tram from the pan fields and are weighed wet, sealed, ledgersigned by two officers, and carried into the bonded cellar until the boat. The respectable question before the house this quarter is not the salt. The salt sells well. The question is the beam.
3. The beam has been re-calibrated four times in the years of record. The first calibration moved the weigh-house on its foundations when the sea wall was rebuilt; the second replaced the knife-edges entirely; the third was ordered by the revenue after the master of that day was found keeping a second, unauthorised set of weights; the fourth followed the loss of the north wall in the storm year, when the beam hung open to weather for a week and a half. Each time the calibrating officer certified the instrument and each time certified, in the same paragraph, that he could not bring the subsidiary platform scale top-side to agree with it; the two instruments of this house read differently on every test weight we possess, within the ounce, and have done so through every service and part since before the memory of anyone employed.
4. On anything else, the instruments disagree. On the Tuesday salt they do not.
5. Against the tubs the two scales return figures identical to the gram, every week, in whatever calibration state they happen to be. When the beam was read a half-ounce light in the third recalibration the platform read a half-ounce heavy the same morning, and both read the tubs at the same figure, and the figure was the figure of 1961. Include the drift. The ledger carries the per-tub weights of the schedule forward in one unbroken column since the first sitting under this reference. Where new tubs enter the schedule — five have entered, through cooperage and storm loss — they arrive on the Tuesday, and the beam reads them at a figure already in the column.
6. The sub-committee put three questions to the house in writing, and the house put its instruments to bed and answered.
7. First: could elder moisture, salt carry-over or tram-wetting account for gram-exact repeat? No, answered the weigh-master; the tubs are weighed wet on standing water and the wetting is not metered; the pan fields can produce anything in a wet month and have done.
8. Second: could the reading officer be reading to the column? The present master, who came up under a master who came up under the founder, answered with the honesty of long service: the column is where a reading officer looks first, and no lifetime of looking stops that. This was the only plain admission in the file and the house records it to his credit.
9. Third: what would the beam return on a Tuesday if the salt arrived at a figure not in the column? The house found it had not been asked the question in sixty years, because the salt has always been weighed before anyone knows what the column holds, and the reading officer of the fourth recalibration, asked directly, referred the sub-committee to the day the north wall stood open. On the first Tuesday the beam was rebuilt, before the knife-edges were finally set, and with all test weights still wild, the house weighed the tubs, and the tubs were gram-exact, and the knife-edges were then set to the tubs and have disagreed with the platform scale ever since.
10. The house notes for the record that this sets the order of things: the schedule set the instrument. Whether the schedule can tell the instrument anything else, or whether anything else can alter the schedule, is undetermined.
11. Recommend no change. The weighings continue Tuesday. The bonded cellar is at capacity, and the same fourteen figures, in the same hand, are going into the tenth consecutive page.