| MadSci Network: Science History |
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Who invented the "English system" of measurements, and when?
There are a number of creative answers. I won't supply one myself; a search in a library should turn up a number of books on word origins and such. I do have a partial answer found using a dictionary on the Mad Scientist website. The answer seems to be that the so-called "system" is really an organic agglomeration of units derived any-old-way, over a considerable period of time. For example, the firkin: a firkin of ale in London is different than a firkin of beer in London, while in the provinces still another value was used for either ale or beer (sensibly, the average of the two London firkins). My source is a hilarious but unfortunately out-of-print essay by Isaac Asimov called "Forget It!" Asimov based his essay on a 200-year- old arithmetic textbook, which contained multitudes of units that we have quite conveniently forgotten.The units themselves (the inch, the foot, the yard, the mile, the quart, the bushel, ...) were settled upon at different times, probably during the medieval period since the ancient Greeks and Romans had their own units (such as the "stadium," a unit of length equal to about 177 meters). Why was this system created on a non-decimal basis? Well, the "English system of measurements" wasn't a system. And decimal notation was unknown in Europe until around 1225, so why should anyone have created any system on a decimal basis before then?
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