This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
English Engineering Units article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Felder and Rousseau call this "American Engineering units" system. 76.117.247.55 ( talk) 22:04, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
References to English language measuring systems have differed between the various places where the English language is the standard language for surveying, drafting plans for buildings, specifying parts for cars, trains, planes, boats, railways, submarines, and all their various mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems (MEP) and heating ventilating and air conditioning systems (HVAC).
In many places in the world English was established as an engineering and administrative language by colonial governments in countries where indigenous languages had their own standards of measurement.
One of the more interesting historical facts about English measures is that they include in their etymology a period in which Roman units were the standard in England while most of Europe west of the Rhine and Scotland were using Greek standards of measure. The Roman standards derived from the Egyptian palm while the Greek standards were based on the hand of the Mesopotamian systems. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian systems were commensurate on a metric foot of 300 mm composed of three hands of 100 mm.
Because International trade required that measures be commensurate or convertible in the second millenium BC they became geo-commensurate with body and agricultural measures in a series that in English is finger, thumb (inch) palm, hand, span quarter, foot, remen,short cubit, long cubit, elle. Areas are generally defined as rectangles having sides of a unit length and volumes as cubes having edges of a unit length.
Its a mistake to think that because body measures were referenced to parts of the body as a reference approximation they were not strictly standardized, they were. So were units such as a minute of march measured as 300 royal cubits, a river journey (Itrw) measured as 70 minutes of march
This extends to distance measures used in surveying with yards, fathoms, rods, cords, chains, stadia, miles, and degrees; area measures based on variations of the acre which is fixed by the size of the fields necessary to provide for the oxen or horses plowing it which generally have unit lengths as sides, and to volumes which tend to be the measure of a liguid in cubic inches or a dry measure in cubic feet which will fill a container with subdivisions and extensions using body measure multiples or divisions.
That's where English measures were at when in 1593 Queen Elizabeth 1 signed off on a change to the length of a furlong that increased it from 625 Roman feet of 296 mm to 660 English feet of 304.8 mm making the Mile 5280 English feet so that there were exactly twice as many seconds in a century as inches in the circumference of the Earth at the equator a couple of decades before the formal discovery of the seconds pendulum. 142.0.102.175 ( talk) 11:51, 6 August 2016 (UTC)
The symbol for the pound when used as a unit of mass is lb, not lbm. I tried to fix it (twice) but failed both times. Can someone help with this? Dondervogel 2 ( talk) 23:34, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
@ Dondervogel 2:, I see you changed all cases of "Engineering" in the text to "engineering" per MOS:CAPS. Time to move the article to English engineering units, I suggest, swapping the redirects. -- John Maynard Friedman ( talk) 21:48, 21 June 2020 (UTC)