2002-07-31 I made a similar observation on this matter to this list a year or so ago. I thought if the inch would have been set to 25.6 mm, then products made or designed in fractional inches could be considered hidden metric.
In fact, when I work on older inch based CAD drawings and rescale them to metric when I go to make modifications, I use a scaling factor of 25.6 so the metric dimensions come out more rational. It actually works out very nice. I guess the reason it never was 25.6 was that during the year they took the measurement to compare, the barley corns weren't as plump as in other years. John ----- Original Message ----- From: "Markus Kuhn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, 2002-07-31 07:18 Subject: [USMA:21449] Inch > It just occured to me, had the inch been chosen to be 25.6 mm instead of > 25.4 mm, then all commonly used binary inch fractions would have been > multiples of 0.1 mm, something that no doubt would have significantly > simplified metrication in many industries. > > 1/2 in = 12.8 mm, 1/4 in = 6.4 mm, 1/8 in = 3.2 mm, 1/16 in = 1.6 mm, etc. > > Just a thought, unfortunately two centuries too late ... :( > > Markus > > -- > Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK > Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> >
