Dear All, For those of you who speak in public about measuring methods I recommend to you Keith Gordon Irwin's boo; "The Romance of Weights and Measures" s a rich source of well researched material to add substance to your presentations.
For example, here is an extract from his book that applies to early lengths measures: ## The Simple System of Measurement of Early England Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons eleven centuries ago, became the first king of all England when his power was extended to take in the Angle and Danish areas. One of his acts, as a king, was to have standards constructed that would show the merchants of outside countries the true and exact size of English length units, English weight units, and English measures for liquids and grains. Copies of measuring rods, weight units, and grain measures, stamped officially, could be obtained by a merchant at low cost. In 950, about a century after Alfred's birth, these standards of Alfred were transferred to London to be placed in a special room in Westminster Abbey. There, officials continued Alfred's plan of preparing and checking copies of these standards. Four centuries later, in the time of Edward III, some additional units were added to Alfred's list to take in new measures that had been introduced. In addition, the old standards were carefully duplicated, more permanent materials being used in the construction. Alfred's standards did not include such present-day units as the foot, yard, pound, gallon, or bushel. Corresponding to them were units that are now obsolete. It would be easy, then, to suppose that many units of the weight and measure system brought to England by the Angles, Saxons, Danes, and Jutes were carelessly designed or crudely related to other units and that, later, others were introduced to improve the situation. But Flinders Petrie, who, as we have seen, made the first intensive study of the measurement system of early England, found that the system for distances and farm-land measurements had not been crude or illogical. Instead, it was one of the best that the world has ever known. It was with the units inserted later that the trouble began. The most available source of information about these findings of Petrie is that given on pages 481, 482, and 484 of Volume 28 of the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1910. There, as a part of the lengthy article on "Weights and Measures" which is signed with his initials, Petrie makes such statements as these: "The basis of the present English land measures . . . are neither Roman or Briton in origin. "We can restore the old English system of long measures from the buildings, the statute-prohibitions, the surviving chain and furlong, and the old English mile shown by maps and itineraries." The old plan proved to be decimal in nature, and Petrie likens it to the metric system of today: "It is remarkable how near this early decimal system is the double of the modern decimal system. "Unfortunately the old equivalent of the meter has now disappeared .... Had it not been unhappily driven out by the 12-inch foot we should need but a small change to place our measures in accord with the meter." The Measuring of Length and Distance The measuring plan of early England was built around the length of body parts. The basic unit of the plan was the distance that the Angles called the armstretch and that the Danes referred to as the faedm (fathom); it referred to the spread of the outstretched arms, counting from the tips of the middle fingers. Actually the human armstretch would vary somewhat in length from warrior to warrior but the arm stretch, as an official measure, had a fixed size. Petrie checked its length and found it exactly the same in England as in Scandinavia, early Holland, and Germany. It had the length of 79.20 present-day inches! This great armstretch could have been the reach of some great warrior of the past-and probably was. It may have been close to the armreach of any of the chieftains of the Angles, Saxons, and Danes, or possibly to the reach of such other warriors as Charlemagne of the Franks and Richard the Lionhearted of England. In our own country men the size of Abraham Lincoln may have had armreaches somewhat like that. As Petrie pointed out, the length plan of the great arm stretch of 79.20 present-day inches was a decimal one. For smaller units it was divided into 10 and 100 equal parts. The smaller of these units was called a fingerwidth, since it was very nearly the width of the middle finger near its base. Ten fingerwidths matched the distance across the two hands pressed flat side by side. To the English people a "span" of oxen was a pair of them yoked together, so a span-of-length came to be used to represent the distance across the two hands - a space equal to 10 fingerwidths. The units larger than the arm stretch were also decimally arranged. Ten armstretches was a distance called a chain. Ten chains made a furlong. Ten furlongs made a thus-hund. The last word was their way of pronouncing "thousand" and the term was used to mean a thousand armstretches. Put into table form, this is the plan for length and distance: 10 fingerwidths = 1 span-of-length 10 spans = 1 armstretch 10 armstretches = 1 chain 10 chains = 1 furlong 10 furlongs = 1 thus-hund (or 1000 arm-stretches) Since the armstretch of 79.20 present-day inches is close to twice the meter length of 39.37 inches, and both are parts of a decimal plan, it is easy to understand Petrie's comment about the similarity of the two systems. ## My copy of Irwin's book is the 1960 edition. Amazon has only two copies listed at http://www.amazon.com/Romance-Weights-Measures-Keith-Gordon/dp/B000H591VC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1306028364&sr=1-1 Cheers, Pat Naughtin LCAMS Author of the ebook, Metrication Leaders Guide, see http://metricationmatters.com/MetricationLeadersGuideInfo.html Hear Pat speak at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lshRAPvPZY PO Box 305 Belmont 3216, Geelong, Australia Phone: 61 3 5241 2008 Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for their businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many different trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA. Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST, and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See http://www.metricationmatters.com for more metrication information, contact Pat at [email protected] or to get the free 'Metrication matters' newsletter go to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter to subscribe.
