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The former Weights and Measures office in Seven Sisters, London (590 Seven Sisters Road). The imperial system of units, imperial system or imperial units (also known as British Imperial [1] or Exchequer Standards of 1826) is the system of units first defined in the British Weights and Measures Act 1824 and continued to be developed through a series of Weights and Measures Acts and amendments.
The Russian ruble was the first decimal currency to be used in Europe, dating to 1704, though China had been using a decimal system for at least 2000 years. [2] Elsewhere, the Coinage Act of 1792 introduced decimal currency to the United States, the first English-speaking country to adopt a decimalised currency.
When James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne in 1603, England and Scotland had different systems of measure. Superficially the English and the Scots units of measure were similar – many had the same names – but there were differences in their sizes: in particular the Scots pint and gallon were more than twice the size of their English counterparts. [3]
Thus Earth's circumference in nautical miles would be 21 600 (viz., 60 minutes of arc × 360 degrees in four 90-degree quadrants; a quadrant being the length of the quarter-circle from the North Pole to the equator). In 1669, Jean Picard, a French astronomer, was the first person to measure the Earth accurately.
The United Kingdom initially declined to sign the Treaty of the Metre, but did so in 1883. Meanwhile, British scientists and technologists were at the forefront of the metrication movement – it was the British Association for the Advancement of Science that promoted the CGS system of units as a coherent system [77]: 109 and it was the British ...
The British thermal unit (Btu) is defined as the heat needed to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. [47] It was in use before 1859 as a unit of heat based on imperial units rather than the metric units used by the French [ 48 ] — Clément-Desormes having defined the calorie in terms of the kilogram and ...
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An area of land one chain (four rods) wide by one furlong in length. As the traditional furlong could vary in length from country to country, so did the acre. In England an acre was 4,840 square yards (4,050 m 2), in Scotland 6,150 square yards (5,140 m 2) and in Ireland 7,840 square yards (6,560 m 2). It is a Saxon unit, meaning "field".