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Date: 22 Feb 2005 05:34:59 GMT
From: Gary Fritz <fritzxxxnospamrii.com>
Subject: Re: 9-5 gas mileage?


Pooh Bear <rabbitsfriendsandrelationsnospamail.com> wrote: > Blame the Yanks ! > > They redefined the gallon, pint, ton, that were well recognised > standards before. This made me curious and I did a bit of digging. The gallon was not well-recognized, with a number of different definitions in use. The US standardized on the Queen Anne gallon, which was in wide use back to the days of the Magna Carta but formally specified in 1706. The UK abandoned this unit in 1824 when they adopted the Imperial gallon and other measures, first proposed in the 1819 Report on Weights and Measures. So the ***UK*** abandoned the well recognized standard and redefined the gallon, *NOT* the US. The "ton" also had/has many conflicting definitions: deadweight ton, harbour ton, tons that are units of mass, tons that are units of capacity, etc. Everyone seems to agree that both US (short) tons and UK (long) tons are "20 hundredweights." Logically enough, the US defines a hundredweight as 100 pounds, hence the 2000 lb US ton. This was in effect at least since 1740. The British hundredweight is defined as 8 stone; however, in 1340 King Edward III changed the definition of a stone from 12.5 lbs to 14 lbs, so the hundredweight changed from 100 to 112 lbs. The reasoning behind this change had to do with a change in the definition of how much a "sack" of wool contained, and was an extremely convoluted reasoning. See e.g. http://www.sizes.com/units/sack.htm So the US may have redefined the ton, but there was excellent reason to. The UK definition was absurd and jiggered to cause an inflated sack of cotton to contain an even number of stones -- hardly a logical or sensible basis for measurement. Gary

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