If you have the magazine, I commend the subject article for your reading. It was the old whisky barrel that became the measure of crude oil in the United States. The article explains that Japan measures crude oil in kiloliters and Russia measures it in metric tons (tonnes).
An excerpt includes this, "1866--Oil companies agree to standard barrel size, 42 gal. (160 L) for tax purposes." In a posting I made about two weeks ago, I mentioned that Time includes SI-metric terms within parentheses with usually reasonable approximations. In this case, the exact calculation would have been 158.9872956 L (3.7854118 times 42) which would have been ridiculous if shown to such a degree of accuracy. It would have been negative toward promoting acceptance of SI-metric. Norm Werling
