This week the College moved its display of antique scientific instruments from the library to a lobby in our Science Center. Being the lucky sort, I got to be the local receiving representative. In preparation I was handed a sketch that had been drawn up to indicate the planned placement of the cabinets. I was tickled to see that all the measurements were in meters: room dimensions, cabinet dimensions, and so forth.
It turns out that the library "curator" of this equipment (this had been a part-time duty for him) had made the sketch and he figured that he could do it in metric units since we would surely understand them. This gent turns out to be an avid student of archaeo-architecture and he has at least one published paper on the proportion patterns of Greek and Roman temples. He gave me a copy of a paper he published in "Architectural History", a British society journal. The only non-metric units I saw in that paper were the Doric foot, the dactyl, and the Solonian foot. In both his sketch for the new display area and in his paper, Gene Waddell measured in meters to the nearest centimeter, e.g., 1.73 m, or to the nearest millimeter as appropriate. (Of course, in this British journal that is spelt metre.) Most of my week was a series of headaches, but the thrill of seeing this display of scientific instrument artifacts and the joy of seeing a metric paper in a non-science field, published by a colleague, made the week superb overall. Someday, our foot and inch will seem as arcane and obscure as the Doric foot and dactyl. Jim -- James R. Frysinger Lifetime Certified Advanced Metrication Specialist Senior Member, IEEE http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Office: Physics Lab Manager, Lecturer Dept. of Physics and Astronomy University/College of Charleston 66 George Street Charleston, SC 29424 843.953.7644 (phone) 843.953.4824 (FAX) Home: 10 Captiva Row Charleston, SC 29407 843.225.0805
