The list goes on and on, saving a fortune for industries worldwide. Separate standards deal with the diameter of washers, the tolerance of bolts, the coating of nuts. Take screws: ISO 272 specifies widths across flats ISO 4757 deals with cross recesses and ISO 7721-1 deals with countersunk heads. All of it is numbingly technical, with more than 400,000 pages of standards drawn up by some 30,000 experts from 140 countries. Much of the standardization work is split between the ISO, the electrical commission and the International Telecommunications Union. CD-ROMs and DVDs are being standardized because the industry agreed to do so at the outset. You still can’t watch an American-made video with a European VCR or vice-versa.

France, for example, chose the Secam television system and imposed it on its colonies in Africa, at the expense of Germany’s PAL system and the United States’ NTSC.

Many national standards have the effect of stopping competitors. The organization, which represents manufacturers, said it doesn’t even know how many varieties of plugs exist. “We don’t have the power to say to countries, ‘You have to rip out all your sockets and replace all the plugs from your household appliances,’” said Dennis Brougham of the International Electrotechnical Commission. Discussions on a common standard for a plug began in the 1930s, yet it’s still a hodgepodge, the most common of which are American plugs with flat copper prongs, continental European plugs with round prongs, and British ones with rectangular prongs. So how come it doesn’t? Because even though dozens more standards are added every year in the relentless march toward harmonization and globalization, plugs are one of the stubborn holdouts. There are no laws to force compliance, just the power of the market and the common-sense fact that life is easier when your hair dryer plugs in everywhere on the globe. “Standards are all around us, but nobody sees them,” says Anke Varcin of the International Standards Organization, which coordinates the work of national institutions and works to increase public awareness of the 20,000 or so standards that harmonize everything from air-quality control through anticorrosion devices for underwater oil pipelines to the sweat resistance of a shirt. It’s why an American renting a Japanese-made car in Liechtenstein will see the same dashboard symbols as at home, and find batteries for his camera at a store in the Alps. An elaborate system of standards has seen to that. It’s no accident, for instance, that credit cards are the same size from Wilmington, Del., to Wellington, New Zealand. The humble screw, along with bolts, nails and all other types of fasteners, is subject to a mind-boggling 160 size and quality controls under an international system intended to make everyday life safer and simpler. GENEVA What’s in a screw? Well, there’s ISO 272, ISO 4757 and ISO 7721.

Mojdeh rowshan tabari