Note that using the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics tables on density of water at std P, that the weight of one fluid ounce of water at 100C (a standards point) weighs, within 1% accuracy, one aviordupois ounce. and at its most dense, one ounce of water weighs, within 4% accuracy, one avoidupois ounce. (If I wish to change the present std for pressure in measurements, it can be at a common point)
Within 5% accuracy, one fluid ounce of water weighs one avoirdupois ounce
A pint's a pound the world around - buttuming you use US pints, use a standard point for water, use a standard pressure, and use the modern government-defined conversions between the two that were put in in the past couple hundred years.
A little farther back........... well
Ever wonder how the British could have such a large empire with such a small country and so few people, with it having all those various weights and measures so easily done by average humans back then, compared to larger, more wealthy countries who insisted on the intellectual superiority of decimal based measures back then?
comments below
I think you confuse measure with standard and standard set of measures, and thus miss the core.
In short, 1) a measure is a commonly agreed upon amount, , e.g., I'll trade a bag of your oats for a bag of my wheat - "bag of" being the measure. Society makes these informally as the need arises. They use 3s, 4s, and the like.
while 2) a standard set of measures is a well known amount having support by a standard. E.g., I'll trade a pound of oats for a pound of wheat. Best guess is that neither you or I have a pound weight in our pocket to use as reference, but we measure it against a standard 1 lb weight. Members of society adopt, not make, these in reponse to a standard being created or defined.
And 3) a standard is way to establish the accuracy of a measure, OR force the replacement of an existing measure. In Washington somewhere, there is a block of metal that once was THE US one pound standard. It can be referenced to another standard, e.g., one inch is exactly one of 39.32 equal parts of the platinum irridium 1 meter bar held in Paris. Only an authority makes these. (OK, the bar was replaced, by eager arrogants, by the atomic standard for so many wavelengths of light in a vaccum - against the advice, I might add, of those who advised that just because Einstein found that light is a constant in this gravity field and this space, it may not be always true here - as we recently found it wasn't.)
For any usefulness, the measure needs to be some readily available container or device, conceptually recognizable to the user, and preferably already in use. If confusion even peeks out, the government (tribal leader, emporer, etc.) steps in and says what measure is acceptable for commerce. E.g., if your group wants to use a cup and mine want to use a dup, then social commerce is affected, and the government says "Use cups". Dups fade.
When that standardizing of the measure by an authority happens, the government almost always at the same time also directly or indirectly buttigns a standard for that measure. "The carat shall be the weight of a seed of .....", then writes it down using (in old days) a rare person who can write and very expensive parchment, and sends the word out - on precious stuff, showing how important it is. As time goes on, needed accuracy of the measure increases, and the length from the kings thumb to his nose, measured and a stick of that length put in the royal library to forever be "the yard" (original yard - as good a measure as a meter, once the physical standard is created), no longer can be approximated by holding your arm out - you need a yardstick.
And more importantly, as time goes on in a commercial society, more and more specialized measures are created, agreed upon by the users, and enter the stream of commerce. Pretty soon that library at the royal society is full of standards. Simplification is required. SUch as replacing and old standard with a definition in terms of another existing standard, e.g., "the yard shall now be 36 inches. Period. See inches for the standard. Now toss out that old yard stick with the snot on one end and dirt on the other" Common multiples are employeed in this standardizing of measure. E.g., a 15 ounce pound becomes a 16 ounce pound.
And if you are required to provide standards that must be replicable before and after an experiement so as to have a standardized set or measurement for that experiment to considered be valid, you need to use readily available AND REPLICABLE items to provide the standard for those measures - water, wavelength of argon, etc.
Balance beams of whatever sophistication were common more than
and I saw this after I came to the same conclusion above and responded as above. I do not think, however, that the weights and measures were established millenia ago for international trade, but rather for intranational trade. If you think about it, you are bartering your goods for other goods or even for a weight of gold or silver. And your standard of measure bar you carried in your purse was not the one the other guy carried in his purse, nor the ones the hundred other cultures brought to the port.
No, because in any trade, even though there is more reliance on currency today, value is determined by the buyer and the seller, not by the weight and measure. My jugs of wine of god knows how many liters for your sheep of god knows what weight. Bargain made wihtout scales or measures you couldn't trust anyway.
You mistake what was happening then with the world we live in
No, there has ALWAYS been. From the village elder to the tribal leader to the king.
(And if you look around, you'll find that even now that
Yes, as I noted when you advised the use of ten was natural
But it was not a standard before then. It was merely an aid to barter to speed up the experience curve of the initiate who may not know the value of the stone.
I would dare say that if I the buyer pulled out an fat wheat grain and you the buyer pulled out a millet grain, and each demanded their standard was true and pay up, your fascinating romantric scenario about merchants devising standards would end in some altercation between merchants.
Yes, but 5280 is a multiple of 8, and clearly not one of the evil enemy french multiples of ten. A loyal move by Elizabeth.
No, governments did not, and do not, create units. They created standards.
WORD
The American pint weighs exactly one pound at 212F at about 29.92 inches HG. (and 212 F would be the perfect temperature to measure if one is steam power oriented. And at other temps and pressures, the 1% one gets at std P was easily close enough for rudimentary lab work in the 1600s. but not enough for a modern measure
Note however, several interesting things- First, merchants did not define it, the government did. How does this sit with your position of merchants as all standards creators? Second, I doubt the government created the measure out of the sky. Third, note that there is EXACTLY 10 pounds and exactly 30inHg. Why is that in 1824? Fourth, note that WATER is used as the standard. ANd still is. The same water that, with the proper accuracy and the proper temperature, weighs 16 ounces in a pint. The same water as a standard that makes 16 fluid ounces of water weigh a pound Fifth - that it has ONE gallon. It defines the gallon, not the number of gills or pints in the gallon. Nor how many of anything in it.
So I do not see how it is germaine to the discussion on why someone did or did not try to get 16 ounces to equal 16 ounces
However, measuring
which culture ?
They measured weights by weight and
I have consulted to commercial kitchens, and the recipes there were by weight, not by ratio.
Besides, if it were in ratio, what would it say? 5% butter and 7% raisens and 18% flour?
You really are having a hard time with lab 101 here. Once again, I will explain. There are two ways to measure. Direct, and indirect. For example, if I want you to go six miles and turn, and I tell you to drive for six minutes at 60 miles and hour and then turn, how is that distance travelled different from the distance travelled by my telling you to go 6 miles and then turn? The same. One is direct, and the other indirect. Equally valid measures to get six miles covered. So if I want a pound of butter in the recipe, I can either tell you to put in two cups of butter (indirect) or I can tell you to put in one pound of butter (direct).
But more to the efficiency of indirect measure: I can tell you to put in 1 tbsp of vanilla extract (done by one utensil measure), or Ican tell you to put in 10 grams of vanilla extract (put in by gebreastng a clean container for the scale, measuring tare of a clean utensil for the scale, transferring extract to the container, reading a measurement off a scale of indicating units, adding more as required, and then adding it to the recipe). The tablespoon is an indirect measurement that is far more efficient in mixing the cake than the direct measurement of the weight I specified in the recipe.
measure. barrel
no, a barrel is a noiw a standard number of gallons. Has been STANDARDized for soem time. Your link was a herring for the topic.
inches
and after all that, an ell is still not a yard, as you said, is it?
the NAME ounce predates the present ounce. Did you not see the link to the 15 ounce pound being changed to a 16 ounce pound? Ounces of weight are different, and still are.
And I seriously doubt the ounce came after the cup as you say. Cups are over 30,000 years old.
knows
That is pure obfuscation. You are ducking the question once again. If you have any knowledge of measurement history at all, you know there were two gallons in england - the ale gallon and the wine gallon. And the Imperial gallon was not invented until three centuries AFTER the pound was changed from 15 to 16 ounces. Back when the pint was 16 ounces.
You did not answer - why did they change from the 15 ounce to the 16 ounce pound, when they had a 16 ounce pint? And while you are at it, why does 16 ounces of water at 212F weigh one pound? And what does one pound of steam mean?
The American pint already and
no change - the latin is for frequncy of dosage. Perhaps you have the wrong URL?
The words come from the original latin - the by The 12 happenstance
and once agian you did not answer the question, but shifted topic.
standard,
help for tough roastI find the crockpot the best tool for tough cuts of meat. The crockpot and meat tenderizer (pineapple or papaya juice) are 2 very usable kitchen...
You have a very one-facet view of this. Think - Did the meter come before the liter or the gram, or were they defined in relation to the meter?
Was it that they defined 1 gram as 1 cc of water at its maximum density? Which is EXACTLY what they did.
Was it that they defined a ml as 1 gram of water at its maximum density. Which is EXACTLY what they did.
man put them there at that spot, not God aligning them off the millionth of the distance between the pole and the equator to that point.
How is this any different from what I said before you wandered off about no, its the laws of physics? The meter and the liter and the gram all existed before the French Acadmeie made the metric system? BS. Pure BS.
a NEED and what does that comment have to do with the comment that standards have to be replicable?
I know of your firms engineering. They paid me well for several jobs on their steam turbines that their engineers could not make work.
have know explanations
And derivatives make no sense to a fourth grader. It does to anyone who makes standards. So what does that mean, "makes no sense", exactly?
It would be interesting to know exactly what
Ah, Rush Limbaugh who makes statements buttuming facts not in evidence and builds on those buttumptions to a false conslusion, I DO know where they come from, which is why i am on the commitee.
The logic of it is that is you do not know of the bases of measurement theory or its contextual history, you would then not be able to come to valid conclusions. One must have valid experience to find truth, not experience.
follow better
I will agree on that this far - if you are using base 10, and you are using more than a dozen items in counting. Base 8 and binary are taught in jr high in the US- although not as much as they were a couple decades back, where entire quarters of school math were done in base 8.
I do believe that was not an accepted statement, and you are not suppoerting your claim that it is, only ridiv=culking hte messenger and then restating it. Useful where? For what? By what specific measure do you make this claim
done to change
what does your comments about base 10 have to do with liquid measure? HP (they not
try steam turbine calculations without a binary computer
Your comments reagarding basic british measure vs metric show you have absolutely positively no idea about the basic steam calcualtions that formed the indutrial revolution. Watts are not the problem. Check out a steam table (the one for enthalpy etc, not the one at lunch). Seen the metric one?
they
So kg and newtons are as easily interchangeable, same then as feet for meters, for the average person?
Or dynes. Or pascals or newtons per cc or newtons per m^2 or g per cc or kg per dc or dynes per cc.
Yup, decimal metric looks a lot simpler than their british equivalent, psi, in pressure, at least.
loveagesimal cultures
the old myth of the lack of zero as a concept - don't buy into that. chinese, mayans, the greeks had the concept of zero - it is in many of their mathematical proofs. The romans, whose empire was the largest ever known and thrived in trade, did not have a symbol for zero, because they didn't need it. If there was nothing on the line, then there was nothing.
