The fact that James Watt was a supporter of international standardization of
units based on the decimal number system is a fact that the BWMA is probably
blissfully unaware of. And if you try to explain that to them it will go in
one ear and come out the other. To them metric is foreign, therefore it is
trash. Period.
Watt was in France before the Revolution and met those persons who would
later become the founders of the metric system. Then there were other
British friends and improvers of metric like William Thomson a.k.a. Lord
Kelvin, Maxwell and the British Association for the Advancement of Science,
who developed the cgs system in the nineteenth century. Their work is
sometimes called the "Second reform of measurement".
Han
----- Original Message -----
From: "Pat Naughtin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2001 11:40 PM
Subject: [USMA:13619] Re: No, *you* go first...
Dear Jim and All,
> Your point about paperclips raises the issue of standards around the
house -
or for that matter around the elementary school.
> Mints around the world have copped out of this debate by adopting truly
old
units for coins. For example, the mints of both Australia and the USA seem
proud of the fact that they use Troy units for their coins. I understand
that James Watt, of steam engine fame, tried to standardise coins with
common measures of mass so that ordinary people could check the mass of meat
they got from the butcher by comparing it with a whole load of standardised
pennies. Although James Watt was a supporter of metric measures, I don't
think he was promoting coins with a metric mass....
<snip>
