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Germany was not unique in this. From Ian Mortimer's book The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: "There are considerable complexities attached to other
by gxqoz 6y ago
Germany was not unique in this. From Ian Mortimer's book The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England:
"There are considerable complexities attached to other measures. It is not so much that they vary as they may be differently interpreted, according to what you are trying to measure. A foot in length is the same as your modern foot of 12 inches but if you are measuring cloth you use the ell, normally 45 inches--but 27 inches if the cloth is Flemish. Probably the most complicated measures are those involving liquids. A gallon of wine is not the same volume as a gallon of ale. A standard hogshead contains 63 wine-gallons or 52.5 ale-gallons. Except that there is no such thing as a standard hogshead; there is a standard for wine, another for ale, and a third for beer (which is imported). If you are buying beer in London, a hogshead amounts of 54 ale-gallons; if you are buying ale, it amounts to 48."
And so on.
https://books.google.com/books?id=NF_8YUhO7CUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=time+travelers+guide+to+restoration+england&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi4gLu3mPbvAhU8IDQIHQAFBtQQ6AEwAXoECAEQAg#v=onepage&q=measurement&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=NF_8YUhO7CUC&printsec=fron...
- greggman3 6y agoJapan has several. Not sure if they are obsolete. Rooms are often measured by tatami mats. a 6 mat room, an 8 mat room, etc... I also once bought a tape measure assuming there was only one kind and it was metric but it turned out there are at least 2, metric and the shaku and I bought the wrong one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_units_of_measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_units_of_measurement
- ilamont 6y agoTaiwan (former Japanese colony) still uses 坪 (2 tatami mats) to measure the size of homes. Street markets often use 斤 to measure weight and price items. It’s .6 kg and the English term is “catty”
- carlmr 6y ago>Street markets often use 斤 to measure weight and price items. It’s .6 kg and the English term is “catty” In Mainland 斤 = 0.5kg = metric pound. Apparently 台斤 is used to disambiguate the catty from the pound.
- Scoundreller 6y agoIn a way, we all do this. A 4-person tent can hold about 4 teenagers travelling with nothing. An airline seat is built to the “standard” person, but the average person is overweight/obese in USA. A “lunch” can vary from 500 to 2500 calories. A medium coffee = ???. When a Canadian coffee chain expanded to USA, an order for a medium was put into their L cups. A Tetra Pak of Tropicana has gone from 2L to 1.89L to 1.75L. Don’t even get me started on clothes. Surprisingly, the government has done a great job at maintaining standards in the tobacco industry. Nobody is selling packs of cigarettes with 19 slightly-shorter cigarettes.
- marshmallow_12 6y agonothing makes me angrier then slightly-shorter products. I.e sandwiches packets etc. It's cheating and wrong.
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoImagine my surprise when I designed my first tree house then discovered that 2x4 lumber was actually 1.5x3.5.
- mc32 6y agoIf you get lumber from the Amish, the lumber measures the actual units.
- Clewza313 6y agoIt's even worse than that: Tokyo, Nagoya and Kyoto all have their own incompatible tatami sizes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatami#Size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatami#Size
- zokier 6y agoThe whole reason why French invented the metric system was because they had similar mess of various local measurement units all over the place, which notably made taxation and regulation complicated.
- fanf2 6y agoEngland was better off than France in the 1700s: in England there were national standards for the various measures, but in France they were local and differed from place to place. This opened up all sorts of opportunities for arbitrage and petty fraud. American customary units are a simplified version of the old English measures: the main remnant of different measures for different goods in America is the Winchester bushel for volume of dry goods, and the Queen Anne wine gallon for volume of liquids. The main difference between US customary measures and non-metric British measures is due to the reform of volume measures in the 1800s, which abolished the various old bushels and gallons, and replaced them all with the imperial gallon. (America does not use imperial units.)
- saalweachter 6y agoEngland also went stone crazy and redefined the hundredweight as an even 8 stone (112 lb), while changing the pint to 20oz, making a pint no longer a pound anywhere in the world.
- azepoi 6y agoIt was a mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France_before_the_French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France... each town had variations https://fr.geneawiki.com/index.php?title=Fichier:Instruction_sur_les_mesures_r%C3%A9publicaines_et_les_mesures_anciennes_de_l%27Ain_-_Pages_32-33.JPG https://fr.geneawiki.com/index.php?title=Fichier:Instruction...
- kazen44 6y agoand the reason most of continental Europe started using metric was thanks to napoleon and the Napoleonic wars.
- zeristor 6y agoEven earlier didn’t they have different counting systems fo different items? Like a brace of birds.
- robocat 6y agoAnd in modern times we have made Mega and Giga mean different numbers when applied to memory, computer files, or hard drives... I find this embarrassing and disturbing as an engineer/technologist.
- jalk 6y agoThat has been fixed with mebi/gibibytes for the power of 2 variants - although it doesn’t seem to catch on very fast