Palantir wrote a diary about measurements last week. One thing I know is the width of railroad tracks is the same as the width of chariot wheels of the Roman Empire days. I also know that we divide land up the way we do due to how much room it took to turn an oxen-drawn plow in fields. Stuff like this intrigues me and so I wondered about more measurements.
Why is a mile 5280 feet (or 1760 yards)? It seems rather odd. It’s the Roman’s fault again. The word mile comes from Latin mille passum, which means 1000 paces. The length of five feet (the size of some Roman’ s foot) was considered to be one pace. So a mile was 5000 feet. Hey, that’s not 5280 feet. What gives. One explanation is who’s ever foot the whole thing is based upon had small feet. But another reason and, one that makes more sense, goes back to plowing fields.
It goes back to a furlong, which was the length of the furrow an oxen-drawn plow could plow in a day. But days are of different lengths of time, so a furrow could be variable, right? Well in England Parliment decided to standardize it and so in 1592 declared that a mile would be eight furlongs and that a furlong is 660 feet. So 660 times 8 = 5280 feet.
Bottom line → a mile is based on Roman’s walking 1000 paces and oxen plowing fields which were finally standardized by Parliment. So that’s all clear now.
Nautical miles, however, are a whole different thing. Why? This is based on the size of the entire earth and is defined as one minute of arc along a meridian around the Earth. OK. So a meridian is 360 degrees and each of those degrees is divided further into 60 minutes of arc. Well, each of these minutes of arc is 1/21,600th of the distance around the earth = a nautical mile is 6,076 feet. Well, at least this makes more sense than the other mile.
Back to how we divide the land. We are all familiar with acres. We all know there are 640 acres per square mile. We all know that a city block is supposed to be 1/12th of a mile (12 blocks per mile is the standard). OK, but how did we get these measurements? We have to go back to oxen plowing fields. Remember that a furlong is how long a furrow oxen can plow in a day without rest (they go slowly but surely). Eventually, you need to turn your oxen around to go the other way. It turns out it takes the distance of “one chain” to turn your oxen around. A “chain” is an old Anglo-Saxon measurement of that distance, which turns out to be 66 feet. SO, it was established that an acre is an area of one furlong in length times one chain = 43,560 square feet. 640 acres = 1 square mile.
How about gallons? Romans again. A gallon was a “ pailful.” The Latin word for that is galeta. There was no actual standard for “pailful” for some time. Eventually, in 1707, during the reign of Queen Anne, a standardized “wine gallon” was created. A “wine gallon” is eight troy pounds of wine. Of course, different liquids have different densities and different weights.
Well, we better find where a pound came from otherwise how are we to measure eight troy pounds of wine — which makes a gallon? Back to the Romans...again. It comes from the Roman measurement for weight called a “libre.” That’s why lb is the abbreviation for pound (I always wondered why). The word pound comes from the Latin word pondo which means weight. Well in the 1300’s the English decided to standardize what a pound was in order to sell things by weight instead of volume. They decided a pound would equal 7000 grains. A grain was the average weight of a grain of cereal. Cereal was wheat or barley and so a grain became the average weight of one grain of wheat and one grain of barley divided by two which turns out to be exactly 64.79891 milligrams. A pound was then divided into 16 ounces.
OK, one more. This time no Roman’s are involved because it was a measurement for “modern times.” Until the advent of steam engines, and later combustible engines, hard work was done by beasts of burden. Oxen were the bulldozers and horses were trucks. (BTW, there are only three words in the English language that add -en to the end of the word to make it plural. Those three words are oxen, children, and brethren). We needed some way to rate the power of engines. James Watt (yup, that electric dude) came up with “horsepower.” He had to study what horses could do in order to quantify horsepower. He found the average harnessed horse could lift 550 pounds at a clip of roughly one foot per second, which equaled 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute. But guess what? Watt actually studied ponies because they were a lot easier to deal with. Ponies could do 22,000 foot-pounds of work per minute. He then kinda fudged it by figuring full grown horses were half again stronger than ponies. No studies were done to determine that. James Watt just decided.
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