On the subject of screw-ball measurements; in a book entitled “Men, Machines, & History” (I forget the auther) there is a reference to a unit called a “Tub”. A “Tub” was a local measure of ballast, sand, etc. The suggestion is that when making early barrows the size was chosen to make the most economical use of the local timber growth.  It was used in the NE(?) of England long before railways & mass production required universally recognised units. Wnen London decided to apply the “cwt” over the entire country the “Tub” subsequently worked out to be 2 & 5/8ths hundred weight. A plausible explanation of how a strange (to us) unit came to be used.

Totally useless information, but to paraphase Agatha Christie “That is what makes it so interesting”!

Peter Gain.

Someone will probably tell me I’m wrong but I think It’s because it’s 5 ft between the outer edges of the rail head so 4′ 8″ 1/2″ between the wheel flanges.

 

now I’ve started something

 

Roy

The late Tubal Cain/T. D. Walshaw, in an article in ME (23 May 1997) said that in Europe at one time, the “foot” varied between 9½ and nearly 19 English inches! Also that in France, there were 8 different “feet”!

 

(I always knew that bit of useless information would come in handy someday.)

Regards,

 

Peter G. Shaw

Well that stired up some interesting facts so lets try this one.

I was once told by an old maths teacher who was avidly anti metric that the metric units were devised by Napoleon who had his best brains of the times measure the weight and circumferance of the world and then divide them repeatedly by ten until usable units were arrived at. Said teacher was delighted to tell us that both the original measurements were grossly inaccurate and that therefore metric measurements had no value what so ever.

People like this were our mentors.

Or was he right ?!

I once read that the great Pyramid at Giza is not square at the base – its `out` by about 5/8 in. !! Given the measuring gear they had then compared with now and just think what a small proportion this is of the full length/width. As the TV prog says, How do/did they do that?

John.

The reality of this metre measurement thing is either slightly more boring, or more crazy, depending on your point of view. The real fun was in the 18th century, when there were two favoured approaches to what a metre might be; the first was based on the length of of a pendulum with a half-period of 1 second – but that was determined not to be accurate enough because of the effects of gravity. Personally I think that one was a complete non-starter anyway, because it would have only ever been a secondary standard, as it would have been based on a time measurement, and they really weren’t good back then.

 

The second one was the actual one eventually adopted, and this was based on Méchain and Delambre’s 7 year (1792-99) measurement of the meridian between Dunkerque and Barcelona, along a longitudinal line that just happened to pass through Paris. The exact process of using this as the basis for establishing the length of a quadrant based on this line between the North Pole and the Equator isn’t clear (and they cocked it up anyway) but the basic idea was that if you divided this distance by 10 million, you ended up with the length of 1 metre – so the circumference of the earth, measured on a meridian passing through Paris and both poles is 40,000,000 metres. The cockup? They miscalculated the effect of the earth’s flattening at the poles, and as a result, the original metre bar was 0.2mm short. Makes you wonder what the point was at all, doesn’t it? So Gordon W and J. Verne may not be wrong – but what happened exactly after this expedition isn’t clear at a first glance, and requires more investigation on my part.

 

I’m quite happy with both imperial and metric measurements – my only real objection to the metric ones is that inch, foot, yard, mile (and even pole) all have one syllable, and millimetre, centimetre, kilometre, decimetre, etc all have four. Even metre itself has two, so as ever with the French language, you get a load more verbal garbage than is strictly necessary.  It’s worthy of note that the entire world prefers a lot of english swear words for exactly the same reason!

 The whole saga from start to finish would have been better with no French involvement, obviously. They deliberately picked on something obscure, and then tried to obfuscate it even more, confusing everybody (and themselves) in the process. Of course 40 thou (only one syllable in that too) to the millimetre (ouch) would have been better, and much more convenient – who wants to deal with 39.3700? But oh, no – that would have been far too convenient for everybody else, and that would never do…

 

But then, they’ve always been like that, and have continued to as well. In the world there are essentially three analogue colour television standards – NTSC, PAL and SECAM. Obviously these are acronyms, but they are often referred to (quite accurately) as Never Twice Same Colour (the original American system, Pictures At Last (essentially a German modification of NTSC, and used in the UK) and – wait for it – System Essentially Contrary to the American Model. This last one, needless to say, is the French just tweaking the PAL one to make it slightly different…

 

I love the French – life would be so much more boring without them, wouldn’t it?

 

Since this is a tongue-in-cheek thread, you might be interested to know that in fact we do know the answer to the question “How long is a piece of string?”, and the answer to this is imperial, too.

 

Many years ago a researcher set out to find out the answer. He asked 100 people how long they thought a piece of string was, and when they held out their hands to show him, he whipped out a tape measure and measured the distance between them. He added together all of the results, and divided the total by 100. And then he very proudly announced to the world that a piece of string is 27 1/2 ” long. And unless you come up with some pretty convincing evidence to the contrary, you can’t say he’s wrong, either… !

 

 

sorry could not resist.

chriStephens