I don't know if this article is authoritative; it lacks references, but, certainly, most of it is accurate. It implies we adopted the 2000 lb ton from the UK and they changed to the long ton, somewhere between the American Revolution and the 1824 creation of Imperial. (mostly due to standardizing the stone at 14 lb) http://physics.info/system-english/
stone A unit usually used for bulk agricultural commodities and legally defined as equal to 14 pounds. In practice, however, the weight of a stone varied with the article weighed. glass: 5 lbs sugar, spices: 8 lbs wax: 12 lbs cheese: 16 lbs The word stone is both the singular and plural form of the unit (one stone, two stone, three stone). hundredweight Logically, a hundredweight should be a hundred of something — a hundred pounds would be my educated guess. This was the choice made in England way, way back and adopted by the United States at its founding. But what if you prefer the stone over the pound as your basic unit of weight? This was the case in England soon after the Americans left the Empire. The nearest multiple of a stone greater than a hundredweight is 8 stone or 112 pounds. This became the new hundredweight in England. To distinguish between the two, the original 100 pound hundredweight is called a short hundredweight or a cental while the newer 112 pound hundredweight is called a long hundredweight. ton The origin of this word is the Middle English tun — a big container. Later the word also came to mean the capacity of such a container and was used as a unit of both volume and weight. The volume unit was not as popular as the weight unit except in the railroad business. The original Middle English tun was about as big as a modern boxcar. (Or was the modern boxcar about as big as a Middle English tun?) Eventually it was decided that a ton would be a good name for two thousand pounds. When the hundredweight changed in England, so too did the ton. America kept the unit at 2000 pounds while the English changed the unit to 2240 pounds. (2240 pounds is 160 stone, by the way.) As with the hundredweight, the American ton is called a short ton while the English ton is called a long ton. The similarly sized SI unit of 1000 kg is called a tonne in England or a metric ton in the United States. To misquote George Bernard Shaw, "England and America are two countries divided by a common unit system." --- On Sat, 10/10/09, Michael Payne <[email protected]> wrote: From: Michael Payne <[email protected]> Subject: [USMA:45993] Short Ton To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Date: Saturday, October 10, 2009, 3:37 PM I've been googling around looking for when the Short Ton was adopted by the United States. I've not had much luck, anyone have any idea? Mike Payne
