The dry pint is a subdivision of the bushel and is used only for agricultural products, mostly small, berry-sized fruits, tomatoes, mushrooms and the like. There is also a dry quart and a peck, no dry gallon. Farmers' markets that do not sell by weight are required to use these, and no other, measures. Before 1824, the British used (at least) three gallons, all of which had a bushel equal to 8 gallons. We chose one from column A and one from column B so the US gallon and bushel have no simple relationship, being 231 in³ and 2150.42 in³ respectively. These sizes were defined by Parliament circa 1700. They have an older history as cylindrical measure (diameter and height). We got rid of the foreign king, but we didn't get rid of the foreign ruler.
--- On Mon, 7/23/12, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote: From: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: [USMA:51791] Yet More Confusion of the Non-Metric: The Case of the Two Pints To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Date: Monday, July 23, 2012, 12:45 PM I was recently confronted with a measurement that I had never heard of. I was buying a plastic container of blueberries at Safeway, which I found marked as "1 dry pint." I have to admit: I had never heard of a "dry" paint before. I thought that a pint was a fluid measurement. The label gave a metric equivalent in milliliters. So I looked up this "dry" pint in Wikipedia (as a quick source; I don't trust Wikipedia for a lot of things) and read: "There are two customary pints used in the United States: a liquid pint (473 mL) and a less-common dry pint (551 mL). This difference dates back to the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824, which standardised the various pints in use at the time to a single imperial pint throughout the British Empire. The US pints were unaffected by this and can be traced back to pre-1824 English pints. Each of these pints are defined as one-eighth of the respective gallons but because of differing gallon definitions, the imperial pint is approximately 20% larger than the US liquid pint. However, whereas the imperial pint is divided into 20 imperial fluid ounces, there are 16 US fluid ounces to the US liquid pint making the imperial fluid ounce slightly smaller than the US fluid ounce." What an ungodly mess! Not only are there two pints in the U.S. Customary System, but there is an imperial pint as well, and the latter does not even have 16 ounces! If you buy ice cream, the package is marked in FLUID ounces and milliliters, even though the ice cream is a solid. I suppose that if you bought a "pint" of ice cream, it would be, correspondingly, a (liquid) pint, even though a "dry" pint would be more sensible, as it is a solid? This confusion is absurd. All of these packages in the metric system are marked in milliliters. How simple! This is the kind of thing from practical life that the USMA should be highlighting. People think that the metric system is confusing? How many people could tell you how many ounces there are in a pint, let alone know that there are TWO pints, dry and wet, and that they each denote a significantly different capacity?
