When a retailer weighs out his product in front of the customer, can the customer trust the scales? It is usually up to local government to certify the accuracy of such scales, though in recent years, certification of measuring devices within much of the world has been privatised with various countries’ national laboratories overseeing the certification process.
Continue reading “Is that really one kilogram?”Tag: weights
The report that led the UK from one muddle to another
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”
Metric Views 