This one came over the transom from the mil email…
The question-
“Why does a mile have 5280 feet, that doesn’t make any sense? Everything should just be decimal metric”
The answer-
Actually it makes perfect sense when you know something about surveying land, and farming, and commerce in commodities and crops, and the history of all of the above.
5280 feet is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 22, 24, 32, 40, 48, 66, 80, 96, 100, and 120.
Those are all the customary divisions, fractions, and factors, used in surveying, farming, and commerce, for literally over a thousand years… Except 64, 144, and 128, but you can get to each of those by evenly dividing, adding, or multiplying the other fractions.
A mile is 1760 yards, or 80 surveyor’s chains long… And both of those are evenly divisible into most of the customary fractions as well (a surveyors chain is 22 yards or 66 feet long)
A square mile is easily evenly measured by surveyor chains. It is evenly divisible into 640 acres, or 80 surveyor’s chains squared. All its major fractions are evenly divisible by acres and chains. A quarter square mile is exactly 160 acres. An eighth square mile is exactly 80 acres. A 16th square mile is exactly 40 acres, and so on.
A distance of 5 chains, or 1/16th of a mile or 330 feet long; by 2 chains or a 40th of a mile, or 132 feet wide, is 10 square chains, or one acre.
These were all customary sizes for land parcels and especially for farming…. In fact they still are.
Almost ALL the English customary units make much more sense than metric decimal units, when you understand how they got to be customary units… And when you understand it’s because they are all easily evenly fractioned or factored or multiplied into their larger or smaller customary units.
At which point they become just as intuitive and make just as much sense as decimal units… Or in the context of farming and commerce in actual physical objects, more so, because decimal units can’t be evenly divided in nearly as many ways….
A dozen can be evenly divided into halves, thirds, quarters, or sixths, which can then be evenly divided further into eighths and twelfths. That’s all the customary fractions used in farming and day to day commercial trading for over 1000 years.
You can always evenly divide something in half, even when you don’t have precision instruments or a calculator. Then from there you can get quarters, eights, sixteenths etc… and by evenly splitting, multiplying, and adding, you can get to almost any fraction or multiple, evenly, and in your head, or with actual physical objects or substances in front of you… No scales or measuring tools needed.
It’s why base 12, or base 16, or base 64, are actually much better number systems than decimal. Much more evenly divisible fractions.
And since much of the USA was divided by acres back in the day… And our predecessors came from England, many from ‘rural’ England, it does make perfect sense. Also, we were smart enough NOT to bow to the rest of the world and go along with the metric crap… 🙂
Totally agree with every inch of your description mate. Sod the European Union, and its metric system.
Bless Maggie Thatcher and her little cotton socks; for her stance against the EU when it tried to foist its currency and kilometres upon the U.K. My right to speed in mph, as well as pay the fine in £Sterling remains to this day.
And I would like to thank Gawd and nature for the English Channel, which provides our ‘moat,’ keeping Europe at bay.
Inch / feet / pounds / ounces all came from archaic practices in the real world where humans live and work.
IIRC, the “meter” was originally proposed as “one ten millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole” which is as arbitrary standard as I’ve ever heard (what about all the other planets? Picking only ours for that measurement seems….discriminatory, or “planetist.”). And, when it was discovered that the north pole moves because the planet wobbles and the magnetic pole shifts, the meter became described as a bar of specific length kept at a specific temperature, then as science progressed (really, as the technology advanced allowing increasingly precise measurements, a meter became a certain number of the wavelengths of a particular frequency of light (seems unfair to all the other frequencies of light if you ask me…is there such a thing as “lightism’?).
In the human realm, simple math rules. If everything was always one meter long, one liter in volume, or one kilogram in weight, metric would be the standard; but when I want a pint of milk, a quarter pound of chicken, and three feet of ribbon, it’s easy. As for .237 liter of milk, a McDonald’s .113 kilo burger, or .9144 meters of ribbon, not so much.
Had we grown up in the metric world, using such artifical units of measurement might seem….normal. But, British, and Americans, grew up in a world where human standards and practices prevailed.
Do not forget it was the French who devised the metric system; in which of their many sequential republics that occurred, I cannot remember.
I am amused by the idea that despite the claims of dividing a line from Pole to Equator (through Paris, yet) that the REAL definition of the ‘kilometer’ is: “The minimum distance at which sheep still appear picturesque.”
An “acre” was defined at one time as the amount of land a man and a team of oxen could plow in a typical, fair-weather day in the spring. So the measurements also have roots in the labor requirements to till and sow the land which is core to man’s survival.
A 40 acre field (1/16th of a square mile) requires 40 days of good weather to plow.
A man with a mule could plow two acres a day in good weather with good soil. There’s a reason for the old standard of ’40 acres and a mule.’ That’s also the reason for furlongs – long furrows, 220 yards long. You lose less time to turning.
Furlong. It’s called that for a Reason.
Another traditional measure, a dozen, 12, is divisible by 1,2,3,4 and 6. A dozen dozens is your 144.
Heh. Parts of Texas were surveyed in Texas chains, US standard chains, and/or varas. I got really, really good at calculating the differences so I could bring everything into US chains.
No, I didn’t try to find out why a Texas chain was slightly different from a US chain. I had a “few” other things to sort out (converting acre/feet to cubic liters, among other “fun” things …)
I’m gonna be a bit contrarian. I’m not yet coffeed up so please feel free to correct me.
“Divisible by” with lotsa factors is a bit misleading in that if the dividend is evenly divisible by the divisor, then it is also evenly divisible by factors of the divisor. So, if your number is evenly divisible by 2, it’s also evenly divisible by 4,6,8, etc.
It ain’t like metric is a new-fangled thing that the US Guvamint was recently forced to use:
“early 1800’s, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey
used meter and kilogram standards”
“in 1866, Congress authorized the use of
the metric system and supplied each state with a set of standard metric weights and measures”
In 1875, we signed the Treaty of the Meter.
“In 1893, metric standards…were adopted as the fundamental standards for length and mass in the United States.”
And then things fizzled out, leaving us the only major country not using metric.
OTOH, a system started by Ogg and Ugh picking out rocks and pebbles of about the same weight to allow a way to divvy up that mastodon meat consistently is pretty nifty.
Hmmmmm, a land mile is one minute on a circle going around the poles of 360 degrees, 60 minutes to one degree.
However, a nautical mile is measured the same at the equator….
Oblate Spheroid is the earth,
Nautical mile, regular mile, furlongs, rods, meter, so confusing.
I was on the bridge of an aircraft carrier and heard this:
Captain: “Navigator, where are we? I don’t wanna run aground.”
Commander (waving hands in the air): “How the Hell should I know? You’ve got us going in circles!”
Good times.
Years ago I wrote a research paper about how adoption of the metric system faces a linguistic disadvantages in English speaking countries when imposed to displace Imperial and US Customary units. The English word units are operational definitions: chains, cups, barrels, feet, and grains help you imagine what you need and what to do with them, and if you don’t have an “official standard” chain or foot you can still rough things out and recalibrate later. Metric units are often named after people, and so “some dude” worth of power isn’t as helpful as a horse(power) or a candle(power) for light. Unit prefixes (kilo, milli, micro, etc.) space things apart by three powers of ten and mean you need to specify most quantities in two or three digits, which is more precise then people want to express in most social situations. In English you can find a unit for just about everything you’re doing that’s a single digit and a fraction. We like to say something is a mile and a half away, and feel OK about a recipe calling for two cups and I use 2 and a quarter to finish off the box. In metric I would be off by 59 units (cc or ml) and feel like more incompetent than being off by just a quarter. For anyone who insists that converting SI units is always easy I explain that 1 BTU is the amount of energy to raise 1 pound of water 1 degree F, and then ask him or her to convert Joules to electron-volts.
On the other hoof, if you’ve done thermodynamics problems, metric/SI is your friend. It makes the computations SIMPLE(r). Now, converting from Imperial to SI, running the equations, and converting back is (or OUGHT TO BE) Perfectly Acceptable.
[And.. electrical seems weird with the lead/lag and complex numbers… but it ain’t NUTHIN’ compared to multiple steam cycles with varying Q[uality] factors!]
A long time ago this EE had to take Thermo. The mechanical engineering department was pretty old school and all of the problems were in English units. I started each problem by converting all of the givens into metric units and converted the answer back at the end.
[And for John Fisher below] As long as you have your Keenan and Keyes tables in “your units,” you can handle BTUs per pound(mass,) refrigerator tons, and pounds of water when you condense the steam, and you can run around a steam power cycle with decent ease. “A pint’s a pound the world around” is CLOSE but not REALLY. (It’s 8.33 lbm per US gal.)
Only thing you may have to watch for is Pounds-FORCE vs Pounds-MASS where just like in Metric you have to divide out the 9.82 m/sec^s and in US customary units that’ll be 32.2 for slugs (which *nobody* I know ever really used) or 386 inches/sec^2, and “386” is an easy number to remember if you’ve been around computers before they all got connected to the internet and a personal computer was slightly smaller than a suitcase.
Also, a “mile” was originally 1,000 Roman paces: “mille passuum,” and was the distance men could march before taking a break to stay within their aerobic reserve. Similarly, (h/t to ERJ) a furlong is the distance an ox can plow without exceeding its aerobic reserve. NB: This does *not* work with a horse. Zero degrees F was an early foray into finding an absolute coldness, but still useful at sea because below that, ANY concentration of water and salt will be turning solid. 100F is the healthy body temperature of a cow. (Dairy men be keepin’ it 100…)
1,000 paces = 5280 feet can tell you something about the height of the average Roman soldier.
And a ‘pace’ was NOT one foot then the other, but the SAME foot again… so it can SEEM double to modern folk.
Or I have been mis-informed? I… wasn’t exactly out watching Roman soldiers march about, you see.
You are correct, and it’s roughly proportional to the height of the person at a walk on level ground. So although this would approximate Roman legionnaires at a little over 5ft 3in, stride length shortens under load, so while they could have been a few inches taller on average (there are some data taken from the bodies found at Pompeii that indicate 5′ 5″ to 5′ 7″ for men) and we are looking at 1,000 paces with at least some light armor such as boiled leather scales and a bit of gear and possibly a bed roll. Also consider that these would be the averages at the time the distance standard was being settled on, and changes in nutrition and regional ethnic variation to literally cause YMMV – your MILES may VARY.
Another SPQR factoid – the vision test for a legionnaire was that he had to see at least 7 stars in the Pleiades cluster. I can’t remember if I could do that with my teenage eyes, but there also would have been no significant light pollution in those days. I suppose a crank back in the day might interpret the recruiter’s question to mean “Have you gotten to ‘light out’ with ALL the daughters without their parents Pleione or Atlas catching wind?”
How heavy of a load were those poor guys carrying? I can walk a flat mile unloaded without getting too winded, and I’m old ‘n fat.
About 60-100lbs of loadout including weapons, armor, clothing, personal kit, squad kit (entrenching tools, 3 spikes, rope, personal portion of cooking equipment/food, personal section of tent)
Pretty much the same weight loadout of a foot soldier until modern times, where loadouts start to exceed 120lbs or more.
And most of that Roman stuff, like armor and weapons, is well distributed and carried by the body. A good backpack, not much different than any soft style backpack until the 1970s, like, oh, say the US Army backpack during WWII (not that dogsqueeze of a pack in WWI, nor the hard leather packs of the ACW) or the WWII German pack, or the Brit pack…
Beans:
Huh. I had no idea they carried that much weight. Considering they didn’t have modern footwear, I would think their feet were unhappy. I could be wrong. Thanks for the info.
TxDot arbitrarily decided to go metric years ago. Specification were converted, a new specification book was adopted, all measurements on a project were demanded in metric units, and the cost was astronomical.
Unfortunately, many manufacturers, including those that make structural steel and rebar, had all their equipment tooled in English units. They refused to spend the money to solve the “feel good” efforts of the Txdot. The backlash was immense, especially when the bureaucrats refused to pay for items that didn’t meet their arbitrary decision. The result was abandoning the pet project, the specifications were returned to English units, and all the extra costs were either absorbed by contractors or taxpayers.
Personally, I think all that subscribed to this effort should have been caned, dipped in salt, and then fired. It sure turned many of my days into cumbersome tasks of conversion, pointless discussions about thousands of a meter differences in quantities, and having to sweet-talk concrete companies into sending concrete anyway, since they didn’t have the computer equipment to convert the standard cubic yard loads into cubic meters. The word on the street was contractors wouldn’t be paid for the concrete, and they weren’t about to take a chance of waiting for their payment while the contractor dealt with TxDot.
This here Canadian still thinks miles in distance feels more natural than kilometers.
All- Thanks and some ‘interesting’ points raised! Jess, I didn’t know about that, but agreed!!! Must have been under Richards…sigh
Mathematics can be expensive:
https://everydayastronaut.com/mars-climate-orbiter/
I have read that most of the basic units in the non-metric system are remarkably similar around the earth. It seems that a rock about the size of a man’s palm weighs roughly the same wherever you are, and a measure of drink that will conveniently quench a mild thirst, ditto. In a metricified system, we see human-based units perpetuated. The standard pop-top can is 375ml. The standard bottles of cream are 300ml and 600ml….
The benefit of fractions is that it is relatively easy to take a length of twine and double it over to get 1/2, or in three to get 1/3. Repeat twice and you have eighths. But getting accurate 1/10s is more painful.
The same goes for divining a chunk of meat, or a small pile of grain. Most of us can determine by eye whether two or three portions are relatively even, but ten?
Metric was invented by boffins, for boffins and enforced on the common man… because the common man was too stupid to know what was good for him. Sound familiar ?
Most people whom want us to go metric don’t know…meaning they were never taught…the Old English system of measurements. Yet another failing of our indoctri… err education system.
What, you think that “mistake” wasn’t deliberate? Au contrare! The communists are past masters of losing history. To them, there is no history to be concerned with. They don’t look so stupid when there is no reference to measure their performance against.
During the Carter Interregnum Fed. DOT along with VA. DOT put up mileage signs between DC and Richmond (a distance far greater than mileage can measure) showing both miles and kilometers.
The kilometers were painted over. VDOT cleaned the signs.
Again the kilometers were painted over. VDOT cleaned up again.
The third time the kilometers were torched out. VDOT put up the old signs.
It wasn’t until the ’90s that kilometers were again used along the Prince William Parkway … way over to the side … by the bike trail.
Now that we’ve done area …
2 farthings = 1 halfpenny
2 halfpence = 1 penny (1d)
3 pence = 1 thruppence (3d)
6 pence = 1 sixpence (a ‘tanner’) (6d)
12 pence = 1 shilling (a bob) (1s)
2 shillings = 1 florin ( a ‘two bob bit’) (2s)
2 shillings and 6 pence = 1 half crown (2s 6d)
1 crown = ¼ L = 5s = 60d
The guinea was a coin of approximately one quarter ounce of gold that was minted in Great Britain between 1663 and 1814. The name came from the Guinea region in West Africa, where much of the gold used to make the coins originated. It was the first English machine-struck gold coin, originally worth one pound sterling, equal to twenty shillings, but rises in the price of gold relative to silver caused the value of the guinea to increase, at times to as high as thirty shillings. From 1717 to 1816, its value was officially fixed at twenty-one shillings.
When Britain adopted the gold standard the guinea became a colloquial or specialized term. Although the coin itself no longer circulated, the term guinea survived as a unit of account in some fields. Notable usages included professional fees (medical, legal etc), which were often invoiced in guineas, and horse racing and greyhound racing, and the sale of rams. In each case a guinea meant an amount of one pound and one shilling (21 shillings), or one pound and five pence (£1.05) in decimalised currency.
And it all lead to the pun of sorts in a Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band tune.. ‘l’ for pounds, ‘s’ for shillings, ‘d’ for pence…
“As for what we all want?
Lots of l.s.d.”
Of course, there was also LSD. But even if one desired such, not very much is plenty….
In an English auction, the buyers pay in guineas. The sellers are paid in pounds. The 5% difference is the auctioneer’s fee.
Stfan- Ouch, and yes, VERY costly…
All- Good points, and Stretch, no…just no… I DO NOT need that in my head again, I’m not going back to Britain anytime soon…LOL
For what it is worth a furlong at 220 yards is 1/8 mile and a 40 acre field is one furlong by one furlong. Also Stretch’s ounce is a Troy ounce which is something like 32 grams compared with 28 grams of the other kind of ounce and if I remember right there are 12 Troy ounces in a Troy pound!
One of the inherent problems with the Metric System is that the unit of measure have changed several times over the years. I have, IIRC, three Metric torque wrenches with scales of non-compatible force measurement. Are they ever used? Of course not! Anything that needs accurate torque settings always shows up with data in Foot/lbs, or variations of that, like inch/ounces.
I think their air pressure measurement systems are similar in obtuseness.
Partly depends on sorts of calculations you do most frequently.
Someone who every day does calculations for some obscure physical situation could easily prefer units that most people have never even heard of.
Unit manipulation is a basic skill, and much fodder for entertainment.
And don’t get an old machinist started on metric. Under evil Imperial units, one can get to 0.00001 inch with a good set of tools.
Anyone interested in measurement, machinery, or the Industrial Revolution (American version) should visit The American Precision Museum. https://americanprecision.org/ In Windsor, VT.
Among those who worked in this building were: Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson of revolver fame. Hall, Henry, and Ball of the eponymous rifles fame also worked here. Colt and Enfield ordered machinery from here.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
The Metric System makes people stupid. Because they don’t have to think. Making people think exercises their minds and makes them smarter.
Notice that the people living in the countries running on Metric tend to be stupid.
That was one of the complaints about decimalization of British money.
“Their minds got flabby.” is one quote I remember.
All- Interesting points… thanks!
Thank Gawd for Maggie Thatcher who refused to switch to the €Euro, and maintained £Sterling. Over here the credible shops in our market towns still use imperial as well as metric. And a pint is still a pint in a pub, and if I want to quaff a gallon of ale, I bloomin well can. Thank you Landlord!