The question of adopting metric measures in the UK is not a new proposition; in 1862 Parliament’s Select Committee on Weights and Measures considered the matter and came down firmly in favour of metrication. A century and a half later, we are still waiting for the government to finally complete the job. The full report can be read here. A summary follows:
Continue reading “1862 report from the Select Committee on weights and measures”
The claim is often made by last-ditch defenders of miles, feet, pints and acres that “Imperial units are natural whereas metric units are artificial”. In the first of an occasional series of articles on “myths, misinformation and fallacies” used by opponents of completing metrication, we examine this claim.
A list of such myths is summarised in a webpage on UKMA’s main website at this link entitled “Briefing note for UKMA representatives”. This note arose from a discussion at UKMA’s 2012 annual conference about the abysmal standard of debate heard on local radio phone-in programmes. The original intention was (and remains) to help UKMA members and supporters to make the case in radio and television interviews, in newspaper correspondence and online.
In the coming months we shall be discussing particular arguments from this list and opening them up to readers of MetricViews. This week we look at the claim that:
“Imperial units are natural whereas metric units are artificial”
Continue reading “Myths, misinformation and fallacies (1) – Are imperial units “natural”?”
In June last year, we published a time line up to 1980 showing progress towards the adoption of a single, simple, logical and coherent measurement system in the British Isles. We now bring this story up to date.
Visitors to the Cabinet Office website will see that this branch of the Government is measuring its energy use in “kilowatt-hours per hour”. It is a sad reflection on the quality of civil service support given to this crucial part of the Government machine that such an incongruous and scientifically illiterate measure should be published.
Continue reading “Cabinet Office gets its kilowatts in a twist”
A new series on BBC1 shows how our planet is being “re-engineered”, and it provides pointers to the future, some of them unexpected.
A recent comment on UKMA’s Facebook page has prompted Metric Views to look into NASA’s latest mission to Mars. This is reported to have landed at 06:32 BST on Monday 6 August.
On 15 July 1862, the Select Committee on Weights and Measures of the UK Parliament published a report recommending the adoption of the metric system in the UK. That was 150 years ago. It was also less than forty years after the coming into force of the Weights and Measures Act of 1824, which should have provided Britain and Ireland with ‘correct and uniform’ standards of measures. So what had gone wrong in the intervening years, and what then happened to the Committee’s recommendations?
Continue reading “The report that led the UK from one muddle to another”
To ease the transition to metric measures, straight substitution of units is often used – kg for pounds, metres for yards, km for miles and so on. Ronnie Cohen argues that, as a result, we fail to take advantage of metric’s superiority in dealing with a range of numbers, including the very large (and small).
In Ireland, the changeover from Imperial to metric of its highway distance signs began in the 1990s. This was followed by the change of speed limit signs, which took place over a week-end in January 2005. Seven years on, we take a fresh look at the outcome.
Metric Views has attempted to produce a timeline showing progress in the British Isles towards the adoption of a single, simple, rational and coherent measurement system. This article takes the story up to 1980 – the events of the past thirty years will be the subject of a further post later. Readers’ suggestions for additions and amendments are welcome.
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