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Iron Wolf Saber
BetaMax.
CRONOS.
3243
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Posted - 2013.03.27 13:50:00 -
[1] - Quote
Because once upon a time a foot used to be a foot's length, in particular the king of england's. His thumb an Inch, his stride a yard, so on and so forth. When you got a new king however all the previous measurements had to be redone and people did not like this system at all. So the smart people who where between two kingdoms wanted to have a unit of measurement that would not change between two kings of two nations or generations.
So ledgend goes two scientist got a stick of iron, made two marks and between the two marks made 10 perfect marks and made those into perfect 10 sections of each as well. Thus a meter was born! The stick was then 'weigthed' and thus a kilogram, then the iron was smelted into a bowl and the water it contained was a liter! |
Iron Wolf Saber
BetaMax.
CRONOS.
3243
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Posted - 2013.03.27 14:12:00 -
[2] - Quote
Laheon wrote:Iron Wolf Saber wrote:So ledgend goes two scientist got a stick of iron, made two marks and between the two marks made 10 perfect marks and made those into perfect 10 sections of each as well. Thus a meter was born! The stick was then 'weigthed' and thus a kilogram, then the iron was smelted into a bowl and the water it contained was a liter! Just did the math. A 1m long bar of iron, weighing 1kg, would have to be about 1cm in radius. That gives a volume of about 0.0064 m3 of iron. To hold 1 liter (0.001 m3), the radius of the bowl would need to be 0.078 m in radius. That gives a surface area of 0.0383 m2. This means the bowl would have had to be 16cm thick. Nice bowl.
Sound about right for the era. its not like they had machines... |
Iron Wolf Saber
BetaMax.
CRONOS.
3243
|
Posted - 2013.03.27 14:14:00 -
[3] - Quote
The Dragon Ascendant wrote:Iron Wolf Saber wrote:
So ledgend goes two scientist got a stick of iron, made two marks and between the two marks made 10 perfect marks and made those into perfect 10 sections of each as well. Thus a meter was born! The stick was then 'weigthed' and thus a kilogram, then the iron was smelted into a bowl and the water it contained was a liter!
Actually, a metre was originally 1 ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole. It has been further refined over time as measuring equipment became more accurate. Nowadays it is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. A gram was originally defined as the mass of water 1cm cubed at a temperature of 4 degrees C, making a kilogram the same mass as a litre of water. From this a prototype kilogram was manufactured.
Well its a silly story that was tossed around science classes never went over the history of it.
I will state this though, America flipped to metric would screw its economy over. Transportation costs would be the most fubared followed by sales of other liquids such as milk. |
Iron Wolf Saber
BetaMax.
CRONOS.
3244
|
Posted - 2013.03.27 14:19:00 -
[4] - Quote
Well that is one thing about the 'english' system is that is mostly man guessable... where as metric nearly demands very specific measurements.
I do acknowledge the superiority of a measurement made in the powers of 10 though an a standard that the entire world can agree to.
Just some places are very deeply rooted in tradition of thousands of years, you're not going to suddenly get rid of odd measurements like yalms and the sorts. |
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