Compare some standards of measurement during the early days and today?

Answer 1

My favorite standards of measurment are the old english measurments of area.

The Acre is defined as the size of a plot of land that a single ox can plow in a day.

(obviouly this is very dependent on the ox, the time of year/latitude, and type of soil)

It was more a value of how much your land was worth... But it is a really cool unit of measurement.



The other one that I love is the farenhight scale of temperature.

0 is defined the temperature that salt water froze at. (which if you think about it is basicly ablsolute zero... because if salt water freezes, then just about anything back then would be frozen)

100 was defined, roughly, as the temperature of the human body.

And the scale for the rest of it was set up using the freezing point and the boiling point of water to be separated by 180 degrees (it was based of an idea that the degrees should mimic that of a circle, hence why we call them degrees)


they were all intuative, but not exact... or great for convesion... but then again there was not much of an exact science back then.

Answer 2

Todays standards are, in general, much more stable and reproducible than the older ones.


Doug