Remember that a furlong was considered to be the length of a furrow a team of oxen could plow in one day without resting. Over time, the old Saxon inhabitants of England established that this area was equivalent to a long, thin strip of land one furlong in length and one chain—an old unit of length equivalent to 66 feet—wide. That's how we ended up with an acre that's equivalent to 43, square feet.
As the name implies, scholars think that the foot was actually based on the length of the human foot. The Romans had a unit of measure called a pes that was made up of twelve smaller units called unciae. The Roman pes was a smidge shorter than our foot—it came in at around The inch foot didn't become a common unit of measurement until the reign of Henry I of England during the early 12th century, which has led some scholars to believe it was standardized to correspond to the inch foot of the king.
The gallon we use for our liquids comes from the Roman word galeta , which meant "a pailful. Kelvin IS temperature. Study the SI system and once you understand it, it makes all the sense in the world and it makes life a lot easier! And the temperature they intend when mentioning Centigrade, is Celcius. The metric system makes it easier to do engineering and science calculations such as you mention — e.
Exactly how many times per day do ordinary people make such calculations? It threw out thousands of years of accumulated experience as to what units are practical for everyday life.
And it did so without even understanding this wisdom. The real reason the metric system is so incompatible with the imperial system is political — the French in did not like the British.
Exactly how scientific is it to define the meter as one ten-millionth of the length of the meridian through Paris? Instead of simply using the yard 36 inches? Then we could update a gallon from cubic inches to Etc etc. The metric system is optimized around unit conversions e. This is the least common use of everyday measurements. To belabor that point, consider your example of the weight of a soda can: the US gallon derives by definition from wine — it was originally eight bottles of wine.
The ounce is defined in terms of this — fluid ounces per gallon, or, 16 fluid ounces per bottle of wine. With four ounce servings, there would be precisely four glasses per bottle. The metric system ruined this simplicity when the US adopted the metric standard for wine bottles — the completely logical and practical number of ml.
How often do i care about the weight of the bottle? I care about the number of servings. Because what I generally do with soda cans is drink the content, not calculate how many my trailer can carry. In the US the standard is 12 ounces. And the answer is: it serves two large glasses, or three small glasses. Good luck with You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.
You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Apple TV 3. For the first time in 10, years, farming is not the dominating industry.
Home Contact About Quality on the Web. Peter S Magnusson Thoughts on tech, the tech industry, and other random stuff. Why are there feet in a mile? In that order. Enter religion. Since milestones survived throughout Europe after the fall of Rome, and these were marked with distances to local centers, this provided a surviving reference point for many centuries after.
A rod, in other words, is the distance measured out by your feet as you count off all your fingers and toes and is quite possibly a very ancient measure of distance. The acre became the basis for legal agreements, deeds, taxation, borders, etc throughout Britain, so once established, was there to stay and remains unchanged. When the Normans invaded in , they brought back the Roman system, notably the Roman foot, which was about This led the Norman Kings to define the rod as The Norman foot, probably closer to the The discrepancies between all these different definitions of distance were well understood prior to the sixteenth century.
But the accuracy of distance was not as important as the accuracy of surface. The early part of the Renaissance leads to a dramatic growth in the depth and width of mathematical learning in the sixteenth century.
Finally, with a act of Parliament under Elizabeth I, the various discrepant measurement systems were sorted through and standardized. With various versions of the mile in use throughout the kingdom, the Biblical equivalence of a furlong with a stadium well established, and the definition of an acre important to keep constant, the mile itself was the most malleable.
This left us with the furlong of feet 40 times Like this: Like Loading Posted in: Uncategorized. Glad you found this interesting. Best wishes Jim Wakefield Like Like. Greatings from Holland Jurgen Like Like. Peter, Having moved from Sweden to the U. How many cubic inches are there in a pint? The basic concept of the mile originated in Roman times. The Romans used a unit of distance called the mille passum , which literally translated into "a thousand paces.
If the mile originated with 5, Roman feet, how did we end up with a mile that is 5, feet? Blame the furlong. The furlong wasn't always just an arcane unit of measure that horseracing fans gabbed about; it once had significance as the length of the furrow a team of oxen could plow in a day. In , Parliament set about determining the length of the mile and decided that each one should be made up of eight furlongs. Since a furlong was feet, we ended up with a 5,foot mile. So if the statute mile is the result of Roman influences and plowing oxen, where did the nautical mile get its start?
Strap on your high school geometry helmet for this one. Each nautical mile originally referred to one minute of arc along a meridian around the Earth. Think of a meridian around the Earth as being made up of degrees, and each of those degrees consists of 60 minutes of arc. The soldiers' double paces were about five feet, so the Roman mile was about five-thousand feet.
Since we got our measurement system of inches, feet, yards, and miles from the British, what does the Roman mile have to do with our mile? Well, Britain was part of the Roman Empire from the first to the fifth centuries A. Even before the British started keeping written records of land holdings, the farmers laid out their fields in plowed furrows that were consistently the equivalent of a modern feet long.
This distance became a standard part of their measurements.
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