No matter what part of the world you live in, measurements will be a part of your life. Since everyone uses measurements, it’s important to have a universal standard for measurements. Going back centuries, measurements have played an important part in society.
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1. The Body
“Back in the day,” the easiest way for someone to set a standard for some sort of measurement would be to use the parts of the body. An inch was the width of a thumb. A foot was the length of a foot, and in the 12th century, the yard became the length of the distance between one man’s tip of the nose to the outstretched thumb. That was King Henry I of England.
One such measurement that is a bit of a puzzle is the ell. The word derives from “ulnia,” which would seem to indicate that an ell was the same as someone’s arm. However, the ell is 45 inches. If someone had 45-inch arms, then that person’s arm span across the chest would be close to 9 feet. No one has ever been 9 feet tall.
2. Variations on a Theme
Shakespeare said, “A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.” However, in the ancient world, and even during the Renaissance, measurements weren’t standard. An inch in Germany might not have been the same as an inch in England or in Italy. In Italy, there were many different measuring systems. Often, there would be one in one city and another in another city. Some small towns and villages even had their own.
The first truly standardization of weights and measures on a large scale beyond a single country came about just after the Industrial Revolution. When machines had to be made the same way as other machines of the same type, then they all needed parts that were made using the same measuring system. Steam engines, after all, had to work the same.
3. Decimalization
Even the advent of machines during the Industrial Revolution didn’t completely standardize everything everywhere. There were still hundreds if not thousands, or different kinds of measurements: ells, inches, feet, rods, furlongs, Piedmont mile, Roman mile, etc. In 1795, the French created the metric system, which was and is based upon decimalization. Every unit is either 10 times smaller than the next larger unit or 10 times larger than the next smaller unit. Since 1795, every country except the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia in the world has adopted this system, which is now known as the metric system.
4. Very Small Measurements
The utility of the metric system allows it to measure some of the tiniest items in the world. The nanometer, for example, is one billionth of a meter. You can measure the size of virus DNA at that level. An Angstrom Unit is 10 times smaller than a nanometer. Most atoms are 1 Angstrom Unit in size. Smaller still are “sheds” and “barns,” which count as metric measurements. The number of sheds in a square Angstrom unit is equal to the number 1 followed by 31 zeros. A barn is a number of sheds equal to the number 1 followed by 25 zeros.