MadSci Network: Science History
Query:

Re: when was the english system of measurement created and who created it?

Date: Mon Nov 5 17:15:20 2007
Posted By: Tom Hancewicz, Staff, Advanced Imaging and Measurement, Unilever Research & Development
Area of science: Science History
ID: 1193602349.Sh
Message:

It’s not very easy to assign credit to any individual for inventing the first system of weights and measures or to say exactly when it was started. The British system of measuring including the foot, yard, second, pound, and gallon, grew up informally and in a disorganized way over many centuries. Its foundation rested on those systems used by the Greeks and Romans but goes back considerably farther that that. The first somewhat standardized units of measurement probably came into use shortly after the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. These units were tied to easily obtained or produced standards. The yard, for example, was decreed as the distance from King Henry II's nose to the thumb of his outstretched hand. (Henry II of England reigned from 1154 to 1189.) King Edward I of England is perhaps the first to order a permanent unit of measure in the form of a stick made of iron to serve as a master standard yardstick for the entire kingdom. This master yardstick was called the "iron ulna", after the bone of the forearm, and it was standardized as the length of a yard, very close to the length of our present-day yard. King Edward realized that constancy and permanence was the key to any standard system. He also decreed that the foot measure should be one-third the length of the yard, and the inch one thirty-sixth. So, you might consider Henry II and Edward I as beginning what we call the English system of measurement.

It's a little easier when talking about the Metric system of weights and measures. Most historians agree that Gabriel Mouton, the vicar of St. Paul's Church in Lyons, France, is the “founding father” of the metric system. He proposed a decimal system of measurement in 1670. Mouton based it on the length of one minute of arc of a great circle of the Earth (now called a nautical mile, 1852 meters). He also proposed the swing-length of a pendulum with a frequency of one beat per second as the unit of length (about 25 cm). A pendulum beating with this length would have been fairly easy to produce, thus facilitating the widespread distribution of uniform standards. Over the years, his work was revised, improved, and extended by a number of French scientists.


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