Over twenty years ago, a group of market traders were prosecuted for using imperial measures (without showing the equivalent in metric units) and using unauthorised scales that could only measure in imperial units. Newspapers called this group the Metric Martyrs after Chris Howell, then weights and measures spokesman for the Institute of Trading Standards Administration (today the Trading Standards Institute), said that they could martyr themselves if they wanted to. As Ministers are thinking about allowing traders to choose imperial or metric units, we look at what is wrong with the Metric Martyrs’ arguments for freedom of choice in measurement usage.
Continue reading “Why the Metric Martyrs were wrong”Tag: fruit
The battle for measurement supremacy
In December 2015, television weather forecasters expressed our record rainfall in millimetres while the national newspapers stubbornly stuck to inches. Apparently, the use two different measurement systems for the same phenomenon is alive and well in the UK. Ronnie Cohen looks at other aspects of British national life where two competing systems are used for measuring the same thing.
Metric Views 