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Getting to know more about the UK

There was (still is) a difference between an English inch and an American inch with some thousandth millimeter, but in 1933 the converter factor was sat to 25.400 mm = 1 tum. by ASA (American Standards Association)!

When I repair my saxes I don’t think it matters if it´s constructed in inches or mm. I just measure up and pick the right size. But screws should be in inches or mm.

“There are only two people I take off my hat to. One is the president of the United States and the other is Mr. Johansson from Sweden.”[/B] Henry M. Leland, manager and founder of Cadillac Automobile Company, in the 20’s.

Johansson invented the gauge block, known as "Jo Blocks". Mass produktion in the assembly line became easier when they could use the ”Jo blocks to calibrate the machines/tools. Maybe Jo Blocks were used in saxophone manufactoring in Elkhart as well? With the ”Jo Blocks” the production became more even and it speeded up the production as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Edvard_Johansson

Thomas
 
Filton said:
I always think that it must be incredibly difficult for anyone from another country to understand what we get up to on this little island of ours..... wouldn't have it any other way though :)
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To make it easy for everyone, I specify tip openings of PPT mouthpieces in various formats

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Pete Thomas said:
Soprano sizes:

5 = 0.002 815 315 315 3 Roman cubits or 1.322156009e-19 light years

6 = 0.000 007 456 439 393 8 furlongs or 0.064 285 714 287 Vietnamese dongs (yes that really is a unit of length)
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jonf said:
There's a reason we stick to miles for distance and fuel economy measurements - we're pretty much forced into it by the fact that distance and speed limits are still measured in imperial for some reason I can't fathom. I'd be far happier if they were in KM just like on the continent.
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Changing from mph etc. to metric just because that's how they do it on the 'continent' would be ridiculously expensive and as unwelcome as the imposition of metric weights.

I use imperial measurements such as mph, feet and inches and pounds etc. because they are meaningful and can be visualised.

One error that frequently happens in print with metric is that an extra 0 will appear in a measurement and is not spotted easily as it would be if 4" (10cm) was printed as 3ft 4" (100cm).

In mph I know what my speed is without looking at the instruments, in metric I would have to take my attention of the road to keep checking at every speed limit change.
 
Being a 71yo, UK-educated, and having lived in Spain for nearly 8 years, I can do most 'conversions' in my head....although, despite being a keen motorist, I don't have a clue about bhp v Kw, nor mpg v litres/100Km (eek!). As for speed limits, I just do what the Spanish appear to do, and take the speed limit signs to be 'miles per hour' :) (120 on motorways, and usually ridiculously low elsewhere)
....Except when my satnav says there's a speed-check approaching!! Incidentally, I choose to keep the satnav calibrated in miles, and mph, as that still signifies more to me.
 
This is one thing that I envy about the UK and the rest of Europe. You can travel a few hours and be in an entirely different country. Sure this can be a hassle when it comes to languages, but I would think this would make for an exciting and interesting life.
 
But Filton, what you're really doing is working in thous.... And have learnt all the fractional sizes as thous. And for a different application you'd be working in hundredths, or 16ths or 64ths..... So working in metric, with it's thousand multiplier from mm to m to Km is really easy and easier as you're not having to deal with fractions all the time. But I'm expecting the mathematicians to chime in and say some thing about 1/3rd being exact and there is no exact way of representing this in decimals...

And if you look at the horsepower calcs/btus and all the messing around going from inches to feet to yards.... multiply by 12, then by 3, and then something else to get to miles.... And don't forget the cricket pitch of 22 yds or 1.... (chain I think).

btw, for JBT - horsepower was a really misleading term, made worse by the car makers/marketeers who'd quote 'horsepower' without saying which horsepower standard applied..... Often the difference was as much as 20% between two different ways of measuring - at the crankshaft, gearbox, wheels etc. no alternator or other ancillaries - just to make the numbers sound higher.

PS is the german term for horsepower, it's a literal translation - Pferdestärke Pferd is horse, and Stärke is power. And the Germans still us it in normal conversation, despite kW being the better term. Pretty much living in the past, and 120PS sounds more than 90kW, despite being the same.
 
Targa said:
Changing from mph etc. to metric just because that's how they do it on the 'continent' would be ridiculously expensive and as unwelcome as the imposition of metric weights.

I use imperial measurements such as mph, feet and inches and pounds etc. because they are meaningful and can be visualised.
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Having made the change from imperial to metric and back again and back again, and from imperial at school to metric at school I can say that that both systems are meaningful and can be visualised. It's what you're familiar with, that's all.

Targa said:
One error that frequently happens in print with metric is that an extra 0 will appear in a measurement and is not spotted easily as it would be if 4" (10cm) was printed as 3ft 4" (100cm).
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Same applies in imperial 40 instead of 400 for instance.

Targa said:
In mph I know what my speed is without looking at the instruments, in metric I would have to take my attention of the road to keep checking at every speed limit change.
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Same argument applies in metric. Just need to adjust. And the older you get, the harder it gets. But I'd never trust my judgment as far as speed limits are concerned. THat's what speedos are for.
 
Kev has reminded me of two stupid items. There was RAC (Rated) Horsepower, purely computed from the bore and number of cylinders, and the early engineering joint Imperial/Metric measurements in the late fifties/early sixties. Whether it was just our, large electronics company's Standards Department or SI but the metric measurements were in kilometre or metre units only. Can you imagine the number of noughts involved?

Our LSD system was logical, sharing the twenty times multiplier of shillings and pounds with hundredweights and tons. The one I could never get my head round was a Saudi Arabian sytem that used a multiplier of twenty-two. Believe it was related to an ancient Arabic system.

Just two things to stir things up a bit, the UK had the first public television transmissions in the world, and the really important parts of the Manhattan Project were carried out at Fort Halsted, Kent, UK.:)>:):welldone
 
old git said:
Our LSD system was logical, sharing the twenty times multiplier of shillings and pounds with hundredweights and tons. The one I could never get my head round was a Saudi Arabian sytem that used a multiplier of twenty-two. Believe it was related to an ancient Arabic system.
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22 yards in a chain.

As I like to explain to my European friends, it's easy, really.

12 inches in a foot
3 feet in a yard
11 yards in a rod
2 rods in a chain
10 chains in a furlong
8 furlongs in a mile

and you write the whole thing in a base 10 number system. What could be simpler than that?
 
A cricket pitch is 22 yards long. And isn't the radius of a curve on UK railways still measured in chains?
Actually my minor dyslexia meant that I could never get to grips properly with pounds, shillings and pence and I was very grateful when money went metric.


It's odd that while we still use miles for road distances and the whole World uses feet as a measure of aircraft flying height, popular scientists and media journalists insist on referring to them in kilometres.

While we buy petrol in litres (and in denominations that don't exist - decimals of a penny, eg 130.9p/litre) we still use miles per gallon as a measure of efficiency.

And my personal favourite is that while we staunchly stuck to imperial measurements in the first half of the 20thC, no-one ever seemed to mind that we also adopted the SI unit of metres to measure wavelength on our radios (before measuring in frequency - Hz - became easier to handle). I did find though that early British WWI wireless sets were calibrated in wavelengths in feet; unmanageably large numbers of them though as the wavelengths used were very long.

YC
 
Jules said:
Jon- I assume you're of the age, like myself, that your education swapped from imperial to metric at just the point when you were absorbing the intuitive knowledge of this kind of thing- hence neither feels ingrained properly......
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Not I. Entirely schooled in metric. Northern comprehensive, in an industrial area where it was expected kids would be tipped straight from school into either iron and steel or petrochemicals industries, all we were taught was metric. Even the woodworking tools were metric (from Germany, I think).
 
I was a chemist, first in industry then as a teacher in a comprehensive school. So I was taught Imperial in primary school, then metric in secondary school. I used metric weights (masses), litres, millilitres, degrees celsius and Kelvin in my professional life, but at home or shopping it was always Imperial and I still have difficulty in relating degrees celsius to the weather; Fahrenheit still seems to be more meaningful unless I am in a lab.
Anyway how did our railway standard gauge come to be 4 ft 81/2 inches? I have heard a tale about a relationship to a horses rear end but can't recall the details. Can anyone help?
O.C.V.
 

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