Metric system of measurements

isaac_newton wrote:
Something that I had not realised until recently was that one of the main motivations behind the metric system was to make it much more difficult for dodgy traders to bamboozle the ordinary folk with all the weird units/currencies, and also to help maintain uniform standards for the scales and measurements...

Yes, the idea behind it was : to have an easy to understand and of global use system ( read : applicable everywhere in France the same way ).

Before that we also had feet, and stuff, and more or less each town had it's version that was usually not the same as the town 50km away.

Getting the whole Revolutionary France using the same system, based on clear defined numbers and math easy to understand by a mostly illiterate population was the idea behind the metric system.

The fact that it worked beyond the wildest dream of the scientists and politicians that created it shows how well it was designed.

Guillaume wrote:Getting the whole Revolutionary France using the same system, based on clear defined numbers and math easy to understand by a mostly illiterate population was the idea behind the metric system.

The fact that it worked beyond the wildest dream of the scientists and politicians that created it shows how well it was designed.

Except it didn't work that well, which is why Napoleonic France came up with a hybrid system using old unit names such as the toise (fathom) and livre (pound) to represent similar sized round metric units (1 toise = 2 Meyers; 1 livre = 1/2 grave). (In the original metric system proposal put forth just before the French Revolution, the kilogram was called the grave and the gram was called the gravet. However, since "grave" is also the equivalent French title of nobility to "count", by the time the metric system was ready to be put into effect by Revolutionary France, they decided to use different names for some reason.

Salisria wrote:

Guillaume wrote:Getting the whole Revolutionary France using the same system, based on clear defined numbers and math easy to understand by a mostly illiterate population was the idea behind the metric system.

The fact that it worked beyond the wildest dream of the scientists and politicians that created it shows how well it was designed.

Except it didn't work that well, which is why Napoleonic France came up with a hybrid system using old unit names such as the toise (fathom) and livre (pound) to represent similar sized round metric units (1 toise = 2 Meyers; 1 livre = 1/2 grave). (In the original metric system proposal put forth just before the French Revolution, the kilogram was called the grave and the gram was called the gravet. However, since "grave" is also the equivalent French title of nobility to "count", by the time the metric system was ready to be put into effect by Revolutionary France, they decided to use different names for some reason.

well - except it must have taken over at some point in the last 200 years - since AFRAIC they are purely metric names now?

isaac_newton wrote:well - except it must have taken over at some point in the last 200 years - since AFRAIC they are purely metric names now?

The July Monarchy of Louis Philippe abandoned the hybrid system of the mesures usuelles for the pure metric system in 1840. So, even in France it took a half century to switch, and the ultimate switch happened long after the French Revolution.

Salisria wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:well - except it must have taken over at some point in the last 200 years - since AFRAIC they are purely metric names now?

The July Monarchy of Louis Philippe abandoned the hybrid system of the mesures usuelles for the pure metric system in 1840. So, even in France it took a half century to switch, and the ultimate switch happened long after the French Revolution.

There's still a few people that talk in Ancien Francs... ( for the unknowing, the Ancient Francs were replaced by the Nouveau Francs ( commonly called the Franc ) which was them replaced by the Euro. )

It takes a generation or two for that kind of change to get completely integrated into the population. ( hell I still do on a semi regular basis the Franc/Euro conversion and that change occured 20 years ago )

10x10x10 The works less well if it's 9.37x9.37x9.37.

However, switching the US via mind control ray to all metric would have almost no effect on science, because we physicists and chemists are already there.

I say almost no, because at one point I was obliged to teach from a physics textbook in which every single homework problem required at least one units conversion from English to SI or the other way. It worked better before the Europeans started naming all physical quantities with word names for SI quantities, rather than staying with cgs esu or mks.

Joat42 wrote:

phillies wrote:"... how many inches are there in 1.3 miles?..."

Let us know the first time you encounter this question outside this class of debates, and why it mattered.

I'll will do that when you let me know that a similar type of conversion have never been done in a real-life situation.

phillies wrote:"What is the mass of a volume 2.57 x 3.14 x 87.6 meters of liquid mercury?" Without a calculator and a copy of the CRC tables, please.

You missed something important, my question contained ALL the relevant information to be easily solved in metric by just multiplying 4 numbers. If you want to refute what I said it's a bad sign that you both remove and "obfuscate" information as a gotcha. For the question to be equal in the context of comparing imperial to metric is should have been: What's the mass of a volume 10x10x10 cm of mercury liquid having a density of 13.534 g/cm³? To get the answer, move the decimal-comma right 3 times and you get 13.534 kg. No conversions, no precision-loss, no tables, no memorized constants.

Salisria wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:well - except it must have taken over at some point in the last 200 years - since AFRAIC they are purely metric names now?

The July Monarchy of Louis Philippe abandoned the hybrid system of the mesures usuelles for the pure metric system in 1840. So, even in France it took a half century to switch, and the ultimate switch happened long after the French Revolution.

I am assured that until not that long ago the pipee was a unit of land area.