Main List: Speaking of Weights and Measures

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Geoff Bannister wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/87598 :
> Far more chaotic was the Imperial system of weights and measures...
> weights: ounce/pound/stone/quarter/hundredweight/ton
> lengths: inch/foot/yard/chain/furlong/mile

About two years ago, I had to to look up 'chain', so while I was at
it, I looked up 'cwt' which I had never figured out what it meant, 
and then I looked up 'hundredweight'. 

One-Look's quick definition feature for 'hundredweight':
"# noun:   a British unit of weight equivalent to 112 pounds
 # noun:   a United States unit of weight equivalent to 100 pounds
 # noun:   a unit of weight equal to 100 kilograms"

http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictH.html#100wt gives:
"hundredweight (Cwt)
    a traditional unit of weight equal to 1/20 ton. The hundredweight
is the English version of a commercial unit used throughout Europe and
known in other countries as the quintal or the zentner. In general,
this unit is larger than 100 pounds avoirdupois, so to fit the
European market the hundredweight was defined in England as 112 pounds
avoirdupois (about 50.8023 kilograms) rather than 100 pounds. This
definition apparently dates from about the middle of the 1300's. The
British hundredweight was divided into 4 quarters [1] of 28 pounds, 8
stone of 14 pounds, or 16 cloves of 7 pounds each. In the United
States, where the currency was decimalized and there wasn't so much
need to align the unit with the quintal and zentner, the hundredweight
came to equal exactly 100 pounds (about 45.3592 kilograms). The U.S.
hundredweight seems to have been invented by merchants around 1840. To
distinguish the two hundredweight units, the British version is often
called the long hundredweight and the American is called the short
hundredweight or cental. The C in the symbol is of course the Roman
numeral 100."

###

I had to figure out 'chain' because of my job. I was supposed to be
creating a database of all the Equipment Assets owned by the
Maintenance of Way department (now remained Wayside Services Group).
Such a database must record the LOCATION of the stuff, and the system
of 'site - building - floor - room' doesn't work very well for stuff
that is out on, or alongside, the track. The Safety class (required
before being allowed to go near the track) said we measure with mile
markers, in tenth of mile increments, plus so many feet.

The inadequate paper or Excel records that MOW had did nothing with
mile markers. They recorded locations in 'stationing', which is
*supposed* to be the distance from the beginning of the line and is
written in the form 1044 + 32.34 meaning 1044 chains plus 32.34 feet.
Of course my next question was 'How long is a chain?" First Manfred
said it was 100 yards and then he said he didn't know; the definitions
I found at at time were 66 feet (22 yards, which I figured out myself
was 1/10 of a furlong which is 1/8 of a mile -- HOW DID that 1/10
sneak into the traditional system?), 100 feet, and 100 meters.


http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/dictC.html#chain
"chain (ch)
    a unit of distance formerly used by surveyors. The traditional
British surveyor's chain, also called Gunter's chain because it was
introduced by the English mathematician Edmund Gunter (1581-1626) in
1620, is 4 rods long: that's equal to exactly 1/10 furlong, 22 yards,
or 66 feet (20.1168 meters). The traditional length of a cricket pitch
is 1 chain. Gunter's chain has the useful property that an acre is
exactly 10 square chains. The chain was divided into 100 links.
American surveyors sometimes used a longer chain of 100 feet, known as
the engineer's chain or Ramsden's chain. (However, Gunter's chain is
also used in the U.S.; in fact, it is an important unit in the Public
Lands Survey System.)"


I eventually figured out for myself that *our* 'chains' were 100 feet,
by finding a diagram of the Red Line that marked some important
locations in stationing and gave the distance between them in feet. So
WHY didn't they just do the stationing in feet???? 1044 + 32.34 would
tidily be 104,432.3 feet!

Possibly because apparently EACH contractor and sub-contractor who
worked on the projects started their stationing at their own
individual random point and ran it whatever direction they liked, so I
got this map of Blue Line track with startioning running from 187 +
0.00 at one end to 35 +12.44 and then the numbers going up again ...
segments where the stationing of the track and the stationing of the
third rail are from extremely different starting points...

I'm not complaining, I'm bragging of how FUNNY railway people are.