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Measurement Terminology

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Lew_Merrick_PE:

--- Quote from: SwarfnStuff on April 12, 2018, 02:35:11 AM ---To be fair to Mr Fahrenheit, he at least knew that there were temperatures below freezing water.
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Actually, Dr. Fahrenhrit was concerned with sailors.  0°F is the temperature when Baltic Seawater froze to a ship's rigging making it too dangerous to climb and handle.  100°F is the body temperature when a sailor should not be expected to perform "deck work."

joshagrady:

--- Quote from: AdeV on April 11, 2018, 02:39:20 PM ---I'm currently reading a fascinating book called "Measuring America", by Andro Linklater. Seems one Thomas Jefferson (I imagine most Americans will know who he is without any introductions...), who spent considerable time in France and was tasked with reforming the USA's exceedingly haphazard and non-standardised Weights and Measures (and currency), proposed a decimal system of feet and inches (10 inches to the foot) based on a rod which, when suspended from one end and set swinging like a pendulum, would have a frequency of exactly 1/2Hz (i.e. 1 second to swing fully to one side, 1 second to swing back again).

I haven't got far enough through the book to find out what happened next, but I can recommend it to anyone who's interested in why the USA is divided up as it is, and how its measurement system came to be!

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Along those lines, I'd recommend One Good Turn by Witold Rybczynski -- a fun history of the development of the screw, and of thread cutting machines.

Pete.:

--- Quote from: Homebrewer on June 24, 2017, 01:22:00 AM ---Hi all!  I've been lurking for a while.  I'm mainly here to read and learn since I'm  couped up in a 3rd floor apartment and have no room for hobbies. 

In reading as many forum posts as I do around the Interwebs, I notice there a great many citizens of The Commonwealth who dabble in machining.  What I find interesting is that you gentlemen seem to alternate back-and-forth between Metric and Imperial measurement quite frquently. 

I am curious: is Imperial measurement still taught outside the US? Or is it simply a relic of a bygone era that's just carrying over to today?  I've been to Canada a few times and all the measurements I saw there were metric.  I had the metric system drilled into my head in grade school so I understand it...and one's as good as the other I suppose.  I guess I'm just commenting on something I find curious.

Cheers,

Jason

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If you mean 'in schools' then in the UK the inch system is not taught in mainstream. As a matter of fact I met a site engineer working on a rail project who asked for a 200mm diameter hole to be drilled in concrete. When I later referred to it as an 8" hole he had no clue what I was on about. He couldn't even tell me what the standard gauge of a railway line was (which is specified in feet and inches) - and he was working on the railway :D

bpud:
I grew up in the UK in the 60s, and now live in Australia.  I'm bilingual in both Imperial and Metric, but much prefer Metric.  However, in the early 70s I was a Work Study Engineer, and we used decimal minutes, i.e 1.50 minutes = 1 minute 30 seconds.  It made so much sense especially when crunching the numbers!!  However I've never heard of decimal minutes being used anywhere else, maybe someone has??
cheers
Bill

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