Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.
Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren’t they?
Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.
Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren’t they?
Very interesting. Not directly related to measurements but a clear practical reason to chose imperial over metric. Cups are also a more convenient measurement for dry, equally dense ingredients.
Metric having intersecting definitions (1l of water = 1kg) and being divisible by 10 have clear advantages for mental arithmetic. But if imperial were consistently base 12 I could be convinced to swap.
It sort of is. At least the scale is the same. Only the base value differs.
“A pint’s a pound the world around” is the ditty. Wherever do you think the metric system got the idea for 1l = 1kg? The serial numbers just got filed off that idea and claimed it as if they invented it. If you look closely, there is a shocking number of base ideas of the, “common” usage measurement system, were simply copied and just re scaled and give new names. Since the base values differ, Celsius and kelvin ain’t the same. Not that it matters of everyday usage. I just want to know if it’s going to be cold, nice or hot when I get up in the morning. I don’t worry about what scale I’m using.
It’s pretty amazing when you start really looking at things to understand just where something originated from, it becomes apparent that there is very little new under the sun.