Tongue in cheek

[michael mParticipant @michaelm]

Is there anything good that has come out of France?

Lots. Just a few more along with those already mentioned would be……..

Descartes

Pascal

Lavoisier

Berthollet

Breguet

Saunier

And Laplace.

Michael M

[Martin KyteParticipant @martinkyte99762]

vic re "the metre should have been recalculated as a fraction of a light year but of course we're dealing with the . . "

didn't its-smee just say that?

"The metre is now the distance travelled in 1/299,792,458 seconds."

That is the light second or the reciprocal of c (the speed of light in a vacuum).

The speed of light is measured in meters/second. In order to define the unit of length you have first to define the second. Now that is done by counting atomic transitions.

Martin

[Brian HParticipant @brianh50089]

I'm sticking with feet, inches, pounds and ounces!

[Geoff TheasbyParticipant @geofftheasby]

Petards:

John, maybe, but also consider the French term, Le Petomane, I'll let you look it up

KWIL, according to my Improvised Explosives Manual, ANFO, Ammonium Nitrate/Fuel Oil, is fertiliser and red diesel. No point in paying the tax, is there? It's also mentioned in an old engineering handbook, which I no longer have, but the later edition doesn't, Quarries used it a lot.

The point about the Metric system is not how it originated, or what it is based on. After all, if we ever meet an alien lifeform, our Earth- or human-based measurements will mean nothing to them anyway. No the advantage lies with progression in 10ths or multiples thereof. So, in a truly imaginary system, devised by Rambling Sid Rumpo, perhaps, the Spolge would be, oh, about 'THIS' big, and millispolges, femtospolges, centispolges would be multiples of 10 up or down from the base unit and it matters not a jot how it was originally invented, so long as everyone uses it.

Geoff

[mark costello 1Participant @markcostello1]

Le Petomane, What an unusual way to make a living, Wife thinks I should apprentice for that!

[egaParticipant @ega]

KWIL:

I am a Francophile but you could have a point about Michelin tires. When I put the car in for MOT recently, having first checked the tires, I was upset to have the tester point out a deep split running along the base of the tread pattern; difficult to spot unless you knew what you might find and the tire was otherwise good. The necessary replacement was not a Michelin!

[John FieldingParticipant @johnfielding34086]

Whilst on the topic perhaps you might to look up the derivation of the gallon and the US gallon!

In days of yore the traders who imported wines and spirits were forever complaining about short measure when the ship docked. Added to which HM Customs & Excise levied import duties on such items and this caused even more dissent to the traders. In a famous trial in the High Court in London a trader was hauled before the court because it was alleged he had understated the quantity of wine which he had imported and was due to pay duty on. This was regarded as a very serious offense and could mean execution if found guilty!

However, this trader was not as dumb as they thought. He had ascertained that in fact there was no official definition of the gallon and HM Customs & Excises did not have a certified measure which could define what a gallon actually was. So the judge let him off and this caused a lot of red faces in the government.

Enter Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart family who rose to the throne in 1702. It seems her husband, who was a Danish prince, was interested in weights and measures and such like and his country had gone through a similar fiasco a little time before, so he was well aware of the problem. Her Majesty ordered the government to do something about it and bl**dy quick at that or heads would roll.

So the brightest (maybe not) minds set to with great determination to define the English Gallon measurement. After much faffing about it was agreed that an English Gallon would be that amount of "Good Thames Water" (River Thames water, which was an open sewer at the time, so it must have been a bit smelly) that would fill a circular container measuring exactly 7-inches in diameter and exactly 6-inches in height. And so came into being in 1707 what became known as the "Queen Ann English Wine Gallon" and laws were passed in Parliament and by Royal proclamation that this was now the official gallon measure and calibrated cylinders were made and assized and kept in the Tower of London for reference. Along with this it meant that all the wooden casks, barrels and other larger and smaller containers had to have a definite volume assigned to them, so everybody was singing off the same hymn sheet. And the Customs and Excise men were very pleased and levied duties on all and sundry.

Now the interesting bit.

Around the same time the Americans decided to standardise on a gallon, as they had just had a big punch up with the British which they won and declared Independence from the Crown, they thought that as they also imported wine and other spirits in wooden casks and barrels they would adopt the same measures, as it meant the politicians didn't have to trouble their heads with such worries.

It came to pass that the Queen Anne Wine Gallon was a bit off and all the other wine casks, barrels etc needed to be adjusted to get everything into line. But the Americans seemed not to be aware of this fact and went on their merry way using the obsolete Gallon measurement.

Fast forward a few years and in the early 1800s oil was discovered in Pennsylvania. The oil well drillers needed a suitable container to put the oil into for transportation and having looked around found lots of wooden casks and barrels no longer needed as the wine etc had been drunk. They chose a wine barrel as the best option as it could be lifted and moved easily and it held 42 of their obsolete US gallons – which at the time was actually now 36 English or Imperial Gallons, today it is 35 Imperial Gallons.

The largest wooden container used for wines etc was the Tun, it held 216 Queen Anne Wine Gallons. Half this volume was a Butt and it held 108 English Gallons at the time. A Puncheon was 1/3 rd of a Tun and held 72 English Gallons. Going down in size we have the Hogshead, Tierce, Barrel, Kilderkin, (an adopted Dutch measure), Firkin, Pin, and these contained 54, 42, 36, 18, 9 and 4 1/2 English Gallons. So the sizes were logical and normally decreased by a factor of 2. The odd one out is the Hogshead, there were two the Wine Hogshead and the Ale Hogshead.

What the Americans called a Barrel is in fact a Tierce, which is French for 1/3 and a Tierce is half a Puncheon, which is 36 English Gallons in measure. And it seems the Americans for some reason got the Tierce and Barrel confused, so that is why today we have a barrel of crude oil as being 42 US Gallons! In Metric measures it is as near as makes no difference 159 litres.

 

 

Edited By John Fielding on 25/02/2016 17:20:55

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Good things out of France? Loads, not least Toast, Mustard, Kissing and Letters!

[DodParticipant @dod]

All this interesting stuff and two pages back I only asked if anybody knew what stuff was measured by the truss

[FarmboyParticipant @farmboy]

Hay and Straw.

36 trusses = 1 load

Thought everybody knew that

[V8EngParticipant @v8eng]

1 Hernia = 1 Truss?

Edited By V8Eng on 25/02/2016 22:19:08

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Place I worked many years ago the Chief Engineer visited his sister in denmark. Whilst he was there he found some cheap tape measures on the market, so he bought some and brought them into the workshop. It took some time and a lot of cursing before we realised that if you measured up with an English tape measure but then made the bits with a Danish one they had no chance of fitting together. It didn't work the other way either, but bits which had been too small became too big if you see what I mean.

[egaParticipant @ega]

duncan webster:

Those tape measures may have been "rules of thumb"!

The Danish for inch is "tomme" and for thumb "tommelfinger".

I recall seeing the advice to use the same rule thoroughout the construction of a job – only applicable in a one-man shop, of course.

[Nick WheelerParticipant @nickwheeler]

Posted by Speedy Builder5 on 25/02/2016 06:56:44:

Ettore Bugatti ??

BobH

He was an Italian who moved to France

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

John, You forgot the noggin which in the end has a model engineering connection.

From the above, can you connect a noggin, your house and a medieval north sea trading vessel? (I think readers of Jeynes Corner may know this one)

[John FieldingParticipant @johnfielding34086]

And don't forget the Egyptian Cubit.

This was the measure used to build the pyramids and was roughly 2-feet in length. It was the dimension of the emperors elbow to his middle finger. As this obviously changed as emperors came and went the sensible Egyptians decided that the cubit should be standardised. In fact Egypt had what we call Weights & Measures thousands of years before any other country.

Someone mentioned the measuring of the diameter of the earth. I recall reading a book on Leonardo da Vinci that the ancients Greeks had this one down to a close tolerance about 2000BC. It involved two deep wells separated by a distance of several hundred kilometers and observing from the bottom of the wells when a star passed overhead. By knowing the exact time difference it was possible to determine the diameter of the Earth. And it wasn't that far off the correct diameter we can measure today.

[Danny M2ZParticipant @dannym2z]

Didn't Noah use cubits when he built the Ark?

The Greek idea seems reasonable but how did they measure the exact time difference?

I used to have a ruler where every 1/2 inch was marked as 1 inch. It was sold to anglers who liked to photograph their catch.

When I was learning basic fitting, tolerances and fits were measured by gnat's whiskers, mick hairs, tads and smidgens. Although imprecise measurements in themselves, they got the message across and the job completed.

* Danny M *

[Gordon WParticipant @gordonw]

And I always thought that the Imperial gallon was 10 lbs of water. Taught when young – A pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter.

[KWILParticipant @kwil]

And long may it be so, if voting OUT (of EU) you could get the gallon back where it belongs.

[Clive HartlandParticipant @clivehartland94829]

Tapemeasures, brings to mind a surveyor who turned up at the door asking to check his tape measure. The story being that he had laid out the foundation of a certain building and as work progressed the precast panels would not fit due to being 3mm too long. So the whole facade ended up 30mm too long.

We laid out the tape and looked down at it with an optical plumb and then using an EDM and did the same at the far end. then placed a measuring prism over it and read the digital distance, it was exactly 3mm out, too long. As they had about 10 big panels he was in the proverbial. He came back the next day and bought a complete EDM measuring kit at approx. £5000. An EDM is an electronic distance measuring device accurate to 0.03 mm or better.

[Russell EberhardtParticipant @russelleberhardt48058]

Posted by KWIL on 26/02/2016 10:14:12:

And long may it be so, if voting OUT (of EU) you could get the gallon back where it belongs.

Please don't do that!

If the UK leaves the EU us retired expats may no longer have our healthcare paid for and our UK pensions frozen as well as the value going down with the pound. Many would have to move back to the UK and you wouldn't want that!

Russell.

[Russell EberhardtParticipant @russelleberhardt48058]

Posted by Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 25/02/2016 23:57:57:

Posted by Speedy Builder5 on 25/02/2016 06:56:44:

Ettore Bugatti ??

BobH

He was an Italian who moved to France

Yes but his cars came from France. There are over 150 of them amongst the 500 or so rare vehicles housed here. Well worth a visit if you are ever in the area. The same town also houses Europe's biggest railway museum so you can combine the two.

Russell.

[JAParticipant @ja]

Posted by Danny M2Z on 25/02/2016 04:31:05:

Liquid measurements in Australia are unique, and they vary from state to state.

Thus we have the Stubby, the Pot, the Schooner, the Middy, the Pony, the Seven, the Ten, the Pint, the Jug, the half-pint and of course the Darwin stubby.

And you reckon you lot are confused? **LINK**

* Danny M *

I have been reliably informed by a friend who settled in Oz that the Stubby was a measure of distance – how many you drank while driving between towns.

JA

Edited By JA on 26/02/2016 11:29:04

[JAParticipant @ja]

Posted by Russell Eberhardt on 26/02/2016 11:10:18:

Posted by Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 25/02/2016 23:57:57:

Posted by Speedy Builder5 on 25/02/2016 06:56:44:

Ettore Bugatti ??

BobH

He was an Italian who moved to France

Yes but his cars came from France. There are over 150 of them amongst the 500 or so rare vehicles housed here. Well worth a visit if you are ever in the area. The same town also houses Europe's biggest railway museum so you can combine the two.

Russell.

Visit the railway museum first. I think the Mulhouse museums were done to death in a thread a few years ago.

Mind you Mulhouse and Molshiem were in Germany between 1871 and 1919. Does that make a difference?

JA

Edited By JA on 26/02/2016 11:30:08

[John FieldingParticipant @johnfielding34086]

Mind you Mulhouse and Molshiem were in Germany between 1871 and 1919. Does that make a difference?

Actually they were not in Germany at all. The state of Germany did not exist until 1920. The portion you are referring to was called Alsace-Lorraine (where the name Alsation is derived from and the dogs were bred) and it was a disputed portion of land between the Austro-Prussian Empire and France. Prior to WW1 the various numerous states that today make up Germany were all independent and had influences from the Hungarian empires, the Austrian empires and several others. Every so often a tiff would break out between France and the others and a mini-war ensued over this piece of land. The nearby Italians also had an immense influence and the skilled craftsmen migrated to Alsace-Lorraine to get away from the endless wars and squabbles. That was the reason Bugatti set up his factory in this area. He had the best craftsmen who just wanted to work and not get involved with petty squabbles. After WW1 Alsace-Lorraine was awarded to France but Hitler later wanted it back into the Germanic empire along with Austria.

Nowadays the Alsation dog is more often referred by its other name as German Shepherd dogs, as that was what they were bred for originally.

[Author]

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