Comments on: Are imperial units “natural”? (and some useful rules of thumb)

by: Han Maenen

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:49:56 +0000

I live in The Netherlands. I read the part of the article about making invoices. My father went to secondary school and then to business school before the Second World War. And he also had to go through the torment of making up invoices in Lsd/ton.cwt.qr.lb. He had exactly the same feelings about it - he deeply hated having to go through this. Making up such invoices was taught up to the sixties. With the spread of metric and the demise of Lsd money this teaching came to an end.

by: Roddy Urquhart

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:18:25 +0000

The “imperial is natural” argument is appealing but on afterthought very disturbing…after all as humans we vary a lot in size.

As somebody with a size 27.5 cm foot (size 9 UK, size 9.5 US some of the time…as US standards are not so standard) I am somebody that “imperialists” would regard as having an “unnatural” foot size. The imperial foot is 30.5 cm so a UK size 12. But what percentage of the UK population has the elite size of 12? Most of us are disqualified.

Anybody who argues that imperial is natural should, for the sake of consistency, argue that the vast majority of us have sub-natural or defective feet sizes. This smacks of “foot-apartheid”. A standard, natural foot size could only be achieved by Nazi-style cloning.

We should face the fact that foot sizes vary naturally and that there is no “natural foot size”. Let’s enjoy our natural diversity and use a sensible metric set of units as a standard way to measure that.

by: David

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:12:10 +0000

> To people brought up in exclusively metric countries, litres, metres and kilograms also seem “natural”.

..not just foreigners. Never forget that the metric system is, at least until we enter the adult world and all kinds of random units also get hurled at us, also the “native” and natural system of measurement to all of us who learned it at school!

Of course there are all kinds of natural-feeling metric measurements: my pinkie finger is about 1 cm across, my hand about 10 cm, the span of my hand (thumb and pinkie outstretched) about 20 cm. Handy for estimating measurements if you don’t have a tape measure. But, of course, such measurements vary from person to person, making any claims of innate naturalness of such measurements (either in the metric system or in any of the various and varying archaic systems) nothing but pure nonsense.

Where the metric system does have a natural elegance is in the relationships between all of the basic units. The fact that a litre of water weighs a kilogram is a work of genius. And all of the other basic units also have simple one-to-one relationships: 1 watt = 1 joule/second, and so on.

by: Phil Hall

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:00:22 +0000

A very good article. Hopefully people will read it and realise that the unit sizes in metric are quite useful after all.
In addition to the above I think that the millimetre is very helpful too. It’s a bit fine for many applications but that is no bad thing. By expressing dimensions of things in mm (no more than a few metres in length), everything is in whole numbers only. Very useful in drawings, documents and working practices generally. By contrast there is no scope for this in imperial, where the smallest unit is the inch.