Another example is the SAE horsepower in the sixties. I was just a marketing standard, designed to have the largest possible numeric values in ads, eg. "We offer a splendid new V8 Engine for our new dream car! 427 cu.in! 500 hp! 10 mpg!" 500 SAE gross hp, that is, from which a lot had to be deducted to arrive at the real power. To its eternal shame, the French car industry adopted the SAE standard. It threatened to become the European standard as well. A 80 SAE hp Peugeot had left 56 hp when measured with the DIN, now ISO standard! It was Ford Europe that did the decent thing; it adopted and pushed the DIN standard in its ads. Probably thanks to Ford, the stupid marketing SAE standard bit the dust in the end.
Han ----- Original Message ----- From: "Adrian Jadic" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, 2002-01-30 21:57 Subject: [USMA:17770] Re: Democracy and metrication I apologize for being late on my reply but other matters took priority. First, I must say that I am mostly pleased with the discussion on this matter. I have also read what the others had to say and I will attempt to compile. I agree with your definition of the hands-free approach as being capitalist and not democratic. The point where I vehemently disagree is when you state: "No one is out there generating new units for properties for which we already have them (which covers just about everything). An absolutely free market in measurements today will NOT generate some hodge-podge of new units of measure. Anyone who even tried to invent new units for things already within the colloquial or metric system would find no acceptance of their units." and: "Other than the plethora of historical units, are companies out there generating new and non-standard units of measure? No. Why would they? Where would the economic incentive be?" My answer is YES, Jim they will generate units and have being doing so! You cannot just ignore the mess of units of measurement generated by the US industry. I will explain: The first and simplest example is the computer screen resolution. Although the pixel size can be easily expressed in mm (0.15..etc.) as it is in Europe the computer manufacturers have invented the dpi. Then they invented the bps (baud per second) then the mips, the flops, the ppm (pages per minute) and God knows how many are there that I don't know about. <snip>
