The Metric Fallacy: An Investigation of the Claims Made for the Metric System and Especially of the Claim that Its Adoption is Necessary in the Interest of Export Trade

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American institute of weights and measures, 1919 - Metric system - 229 pages
 

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Page 148 - ... shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, in any court of competent jurisdiction, shall be punished by a fine of not less than fifty nor more than one hundred dollars or by imprisonment in jail not exceeding six months, or by both such fine and imprisonment.
Page 148 - Congress assembled, that on and after the first day. of January, nineteen hundred and four, all the Departments of the Government of the United States, in the transaction of all business requiring the use of weight and measurement, except in completing the survey of public lands, shall employ and use only the weights and measures of the metric system ; and...
Page 121 - Square Measure 144 square inches = 1 square foot 9 square feet = 1 square yard...
Page 165 - Centigrade degree (l°.8f.) is just twice too large for ordinary studies. The worst difficulty, however, is in the use of the Centigrade scale below freezing. Any one who has had to study figures half of which have minus signs before them knows the amount of labour involved. To average a column of...
Page 148 - ... or by imprisonment for not more than three months, or by both such fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.
Page 3 - ... the anarchy of weights and measures for the textile industry as at the time of the Revolution, for we have the denier of Montpelier and of Milan, for silk, with the aune as a unit of length. We still have the diverse standards of Roubaix, Fourmies and Reims for worsted, the moque of Sedan, the lime, the quart and the sous of Elboeuf, the yard for linen, etc.
Page 153 - ... subject is susceptible, not considering how far it should be extended, or where it finds its boundary in the nature of things and of man, enacts laws inadequate to their purpose, inconsistent with one another, sometimes stubbornly resisting, at others weakly yielding to inveterate uses or abuses, and finishes by increasing the diversities which it was his intention to abolish, and by loading his statute book only with the impotence of authority and the uniformity of confusion.
Page 166 - ... statement by JE Hilgard, Assistant, United States Coast Survey, and Inspector, United States Standard Weights and Measures, who in response to a resolution by the House of Representatives submitted a report dated March 21, 1878, on the obligatory use of the metric system for government business: Not only are lands purchased from the public domain described in a simple decimal system of acres measured by square chains and decimals, but all the most valuable real estate, such as lots and streets...
Page 2 - My department at different times has been called upon to give to the department of weights and measures instructions for accomplishing the total suppression of the measures and weights prohibited by the old law of July 4, 1837, by the seizure of the prohibited articles. The department, in spite of all such efforts, has not succeeded in attaining the desired result. The situation appears to be due to the persistence with which certain trades continue to use the prohibited weights and measures. " I...
Page 179 - The change in our units would entail much greater expense than is usually imagined. The measurements of every plot of ground in the United States have been made in acres, feet and inches, and are publicly recorded with the titles to the land according to the record system peculiar to this country. Hundreds of years would elapse before we could permit ourselves to forget these old measures.

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