Dear Jim and All,
To add to Jim's scholarship on the matter of micron (mikron or mikrom?).
I looked up my 1971 edition of 'The Compact Edition of the Oxford English
Dictionary � On Historical Principles'.
It had two relevant entries � 'mikrom' and 'micron, mikron'
Mikrom
1898 Lord Kelvin 'Nature' 17 Nov 57/1
'Langley, fourteen years ago used ... the word 'mikron' to denote the
millionth of a metre. The letter n has no place in the metrical system, and
I venture to suggest a change of spelling to 'mikrom'.
Micron, mikron
1892 Barker 'Physics' 15
Divided into thousandths of a millimetre; i.e. into microns
1898 Lord Kelvin in Rep. Brit. Assoc. 783
Measured wavelengths as great as 15 mikrons as radiant heat
1905 Brit. Med. Jrnl. 25 Feb 404
The lymphocytes showed all variation in size, from the smallest to some
which were 15 microns in diameter.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
CAMS - Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist
- United States Metric Association
ASM - Accredited Speaking Member
- National Speakers Association of Australia
Member, International Federation for Professional Speakers
--
on 2002/02/03 03.05, James R. Frysinger at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Duncan Bath wrote:
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Pat Naughtin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> ....
>>> Is a micron a nickname for micronewtons, mirolitres, micrometres, or
>>> micrograms?
>>
>> Good question. It answers mine!
>> On second thought - does it? The micron was specific to length, was it
>> not?.
>
> Yes, in 1948 the 9th CGPM declared, in Resolution 7, the micron's
> symbol to be the lowercase Greek letter mu, but the micron existed
> before then as a unit of length (not of mass, volume, or any other
> quantity). I do not find in the brochure a note on when the micron was
> first defined. The table accompanying the 1866 Act of Congress in the
> U.S. does not include the micron (the length table ranges from
> myriameter* down to millimeter) so that probably puts an early bound on
> its inception. My Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary gives 1892
> as the date it was first used and interestingly it was one year later
> that the Mendenhall Order was published.
>
> Jim
> * myriameter = 10 km = 10 000 m; myria was an old metric prefix for 10
> 000.
