The importance to a community of adequate weights and measures supervision scarcely can be overestimated. Next to the personal safety and health of the people, one of the most important of the fundamental obligations of a state of municipality to its citizens is to protect them from other potentially adverse conditions beyond their control, one of which is the regulation of commercial weighing and measuring instruments, and the exercise of reasonable control over the users thereof.
The interests of every person in a community are affected by these activities, because weighing and measuring operations, to a greater or lesser degree, enter into the distribution and sale of all the necessities of life, particularly of food and fuel. The assurance of accurate weights and measures is of vital interest and concern, to the less prosperous members of a community, those whose purchases are necessarily made in the smallest quantities and at the most frequent intervals.
From the time of the enactment of the first General Weights and Measures Law in March 1911, over 87 years ago, weights and measures activities performed at the state level have been done by personnel of the State Department of Health (formerly State Board of Health). Minor amendments were made to the act in 1913 and 1925, but the basic act remained the same. The Acts of 1947 created a Division of Weights and Measures in the State Board of Health. In 1949 the Public Health Code was enacted, and this act preserved and transferred to the Division of Weights and Measures all the rights, powers, and duties previously granted under the General Weights and Measures Law. It is under this act, with more minor amendments having been made, that the Division of Weights and Measures operates today.
The duties of the division include the routine inspection and testing of commercial weighing and measuring devices, the investigation of consumer complaints, and the training of City and County Inspectors. The Division of Weights and Measures provides calibration services through the Metrology Laboratory. The Motor Fuel Program, which has been part of the division since its beginning in January 1992, randomly tests octane levels at retail motor fuel outlets.
Laws Governing State and Local Weights and Measures Programs
IC 24-06-03 as PDF
IC 24-06-03 as HTML
Weights and Measures Regulations
410 IAC 12 as HTML
"...Weights and Measures may be ranked among the necessaries of life to every individual of human society as they enter into the economical arrangements and daily concerns of family." John Quincy Adams in his report to the Senate in 1821
This information was provided by the State of Indiana Weights & Measures website.