He Wrote 0.5. The Book Printed 0.05. Merrick Osgood-Talabi Dies At 79.

SHEFFIELD, England — The notebook says 0.5.

It says it on the right-hand page of 3 September 2002, and again on the facing page of the 11th, in pencil, in the same hand, with the instrument and block number beside it both times.

The book says 0.05.

Merrick Osgood-Talabi, who took the measurement and paid for the book, died on 14 March. He was 79. The cause, according to the South Yorkshire coroner's officer, was cardiac arrest. He was on the pavement outside his flat when it happened, with a 600-millimetre builder's level in his hands, measuring the fall on a paving slab the council had relaid in February.

Three weeks and one block

He was a water engineer for thirty-four years: mains, then sewerage design, then flood risk. He retired in 2001 and flew to Bolivia in 2002 because he had watched a documentary and did not believe the arithmetic in it.

He took the level, a set of feeler gauges, a straightedge he had made himself, and a permit. He measured one H-block — number 14 of the western group — because the permit allowed him one, and because he thought a single number obtained properly was worth more than forty obtained quickly.

What he got was half a millimetre of deviation across the channel floor. It is roughly what a careful man with a spirit level should get, and it is roughly right.

What the book printed

In 2003 he had the report printed by a shop in Rotherham, in an edition of 400, and sold it at cost.

Table 4, page 61, gives the figure as 0.05mm.

That is the number quoted in forty books, in fourteen films, and — until this morning — in this newspaper. It is the number that means machined. Half a millimetre means a man with sand and patience. Five hundredths means something else, and five hundredths is what got into circulation.

Where the point went

Kenneth Ivo Ashworth-Bello set the 2003 edition and is 84. He does not remember the job and said so within a minute of picking up the telephone.

He was useful anyway. Tables, he said, were the thing you re-keyed by hand: a scanner made a mess of columns, so somebody typed them again.

"If you are asking whether a man could move a point one place in a column of forty figures," he said, "the answer is yes, and so could you, and so could the author when he checked it, which is why proofs exist."

The typescript went in the bin in 2003 when the finished copies came back. No marked proof survives. We cannot say who did it.

Three letters

In 2009 he wrote to the publisher of the book that had made the figure famous. In 2014 he wrote to a production company. In 2019 he wrote to this desk.

All three letters are published with this obituary, with his certificates of posting. None of them was answered.

They are not angry letters. Four paragraphs each, a photocopy of the notebook page enclosed, and an offer to pay for the amendment slip himself.

The block, measured again

In May this newspaper paid a metrologist $5,200 to laser-scan block 14, alongside a replica cut with period tools, for a story about how long the cutting takes.

Ingrid Saavedra-Cheung's certificate gives the original channel floor as 0.6 millimetres across 610 millimetres.

That is not 0.05. It is within a tenth of a millimetre of what a retired engineer wrote in pencil in 2002, and it took a laser scanner and a certificate to say so.

He had been dead eight weeks when that scan was taken. The story it was taken for ran on 9 August and does not mention him, because when it was written we did not know his name.

What his daughter has

Ndidi Osgood-Talabi has the notebook, which she has given us, and 240 unsold copies of the book in a wardrobe in Sheffield.

"People assume he was cross about the aliens," she said. "He wasn't. He thought that was daft and none of his business. He was cross about a decimal point. Those are two different men and only one of them gets invited on television."

What this desk records

He died on a pavement, of a heart attack, measuring a paving slab, because water was standing where the fall should have carried it away. He had complained to the council in January; the file shows the complaint, and shows the slab relaid on 20 February.

His last notebook — a smaller one, in his coat pocket — records a fall of 1 in 190 where the specification asks for 1 in 80.

He was right about that as well. Nobody has printed it before now.

He is survived by his daughter, two grandsons, 240 books in a wardrobe, and one digit that this newspaper has finally got round to moving back.