Centimetres , whats the obsession with this unit of measurement?

Question

I have spent all my working life in engineering + some involvement in construction and timber industries.The cm is not used as a unit of measurement by any, it is considered an unfriendly unit ,therefore everything is dimensioned in M or mm. yet all I see & hear is cm this cm that

Answer 1

Outside of engineering it is a visually friendly unit - like the inch, it is relatively easy to visualise 10cm, rather than 100mm. But I agree that in engineering, it has no place - our products (connectors) range from 5mm to 100mm in size, cm would be useless to us.

Answer 2

Centimetre falls into the same sort of (to me) useless units of measurement like Decimetre (10 Centimetres),
Dekametre (10 Metres)
Hectometre (100 Metres)
Personally, from the time the metric system became widely used, if I had a piece of work to measure to make, or cut another one (also engineering) I cut and measured to whatever was the nearest to an easily remembered number.
For instance was it 371/4 inches, or was it 946 millimetres?
Believe me I was by no means alone in using this 'method'.

Answer 3

Unless you live in USA, the rest of the world has been using metric for the last 200 years, and the UK for the last 30 years!

Below the boring bit....

Unit of length (meter) Abbreviations: CGPM, CIPM, BIPM

The origins of the meter go back to at least the 18th century. At that time, there were two competing approaches to the definition of a standard unit of length. Some suggested defining the meter as the length of a pendulum having a half-period of one second; others suggested defining the meter as one ten-millionth of the length of the earth's meridian along a quadrant (one fourth the circumference of the earth). In 1791, soon after the French Revolution, the French Academy of Sciences chose the meridian definition over the pendulum definition because the force of gravity varies slightly over the surface of the earth, affecting the period of the pendulum.

Thus, the meter was intended to equal 10-7 or one ten-millionth of the length of the meridian through Paris from pole to the equator. However, the first prototype was short by 0.2 millimeters because researchers miscalculated the flattening of the earth due to its rotation. Still this length became the standard. (The engraving at the right shows the casting of the platinum-iridium alloy called the "1874 Alloy.") In 1889, a new international prototype was made of an alloy of platinum with 10 percent iridium, to within 0.0001, that was to be measured at the melting point of ice. In 1927, the meter was more precisely defined as the distance, at 0°, between the axes of the two central lines marked on the bar of platinum-iridium kept at the BIPM, and declared Prototype of the meter by the 1st CGPM, this bar being subject to standard atmospheric pressure and supported on two cylinders of at least one centimeter diameter, symmetrically placed in the same horizontal plane at a distance of 571 mm from each other.

The 1889 definition of the meter, based upon the artifact international prototype of platinum-iridium, was replaced by the CGPM in 1960 using a definition based upon a wavelength of krypton-86 radiation. This definition was adopted in order to reduce the uncertainty with which the meter may be realized. In turn, to further reduce the uncertainty, in 1983 the CGPM replaced this latter definition by the following definition:

The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.

Note that the effect of this definition is to fix the speed of light in vacuum at exactly 299 792 458 m·s-1. The original international prototype of the meter, which was sanctioned by the 1st CGPM in 1889, is still kept at the BIPM under the conditions specified in 1889.

Answer 4

But it is so easy! 1 meter is 100 centimeter and 1 cm is 10 mm.
It just depends on the size of the object you want to measure - and if you need it to be very accurate or not.

Answer 5

Could unit measurements of Scoville heat be used? Because Love warms even the coldest of hearts.

Answer 6

You get to actually measure out millimeters, and when you can't, or you don't spend a lot of your time working with measurements, it's difficult to visualise. A lot of people can estimate a centimeter quite accurately using their fingers, but a lot less people can accurately estimate a millimeter, or even a meter.

Answer 7

mm are used in engineering, someone told me once that centimeters were invented to make metric easier for children to learn. Saying somethings 25cm is easier for a 5 year to understand then 250mm.

Answer 8

bugs me too but not as much as the trouble of getting your hands on an all metric tape. as you will know you often have to use the other side of the tape why are they all imperial? how long have we been metric? it's a joke!

Answer 9

I'll be Imperial until I die I'm afraid- down with metric!

Answer 10

centimetres are little furry bugs with many legs