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Or Mars Climate Orbiters, to state the obvious. But your inclusion of long lasting cars is a very good one, tiny differences that seem good enough but aren't c
by usrusr 6y ago
Or Mars Climate Orbiters, to state the obvious.
But your inclusion of long lasting cars is a very good one, tiny differences that seem good enough but aren't can have extreme impact on durability whenever you deal with moving parts. If we had a large number of competing units (like all those pre-metric German foot variations) we'd have a huge number of possible translation pairs of questionable precision and an absurd lack of dimensional conventions (try procuring a ball bearing with a dimension anywhere between full-numbers in mm), leading to lots of "it did fit without noticeable play when I set it up, why is it broken now?" situations. Compared to that, the American duality of imperial and metric is mostly harmless.
- zokier 6y agoI think that long lasting cars was a reference to how Ford was notoriously early adopter of gauge blocks, which eventually became the standard references for inches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block#History
- usrusr 6y agoAh, much less obvious, at least for us non-Americans, thank you.
- Lev1a 6y agoAlso see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
- DavidPeiffer 6y agoThank you. As an industrial engineer, I geek out about things like this. The video is immensely interesting and well presented.
- Lev1a 6y ago> I geek out about things like this Same. Though I "blame" my father ("Schiffbauingenieur" ^= "ship/naval engineer") for my interest in engineering in general, my late grandfather for my interest in electrical engineering and my discovery of "This Old Tony" on YouTube for my recent interest in (manual) machining.
- AngryData 6y agoI feel like the Mars Climate Orbiter could have been lost even in an all metric setup because they did not label their units. Using centimeters instead of decimeters or meters would result and just as much problem as using inches or feet.