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Roman milestone in modern Austria (AD 201), indicating a distance of 28 Roman miles (~41 km) to Teurnia. The basic unit of Roman linear measurement was the pes (plural: pedes) or Roman foot. Investigation of its relation to the English foot goes back at least to 1647, when John Greaves published his Discourse on the Romane foot.
Knotted cords were used by many ancient cultures. The Greek schoenus is referred to as a rope used to measure land. Ropes generally became cables and chains with Pythagoras making the Greek agros a chain of 10 stadia equal to a nautical mile c 540 BC. The Romans used a waxed cord for measuring distances.
[citation needed] Many Roman milestones only record the name of the reigning emperor without giving any placenames or distances. [1] The first Roman milestones appeared on the Appian Way. At the centre of Rome, the "Golden Milestone" was erected to mark the presumed centre of the empire: this milestone has since been lost.
The troy pound (~373.2 g) used in England and the United States for monetary purposes, like the Roman pound, was divided into 12 ounces, but the Roman uncia (ounce) was smaller. The carat is a unit for measuring gemstones that had its origin in the carob seed, which later was standardized at 1/144 ounce and then 0.2 gram.
Ottoman units of measurement: 2,065: Portugal: 2,220: Gallo-Roman league: Gallo-Roman culture: 1 + 1 ⁄ 2 miles: Under the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus, this replaced the Roman mile as the official unit of distance in the Gallic and Germanic provinces, although there were regional and temporal variations. [11] 2,470: Sardinia, Piemont ...
Nautical miles and knots are almost universally used for aeronautical and maritime navigation, because of their relationship with degrees and minutes of latitude and the convenience of using the latitude scale on a map for distance measuring. The data mile is used in radar-related subjects and is equal to 6,000 feet (1.8288 kilometres). [90]
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Possibly the first evidence for the use of an odometer can be found in the works of the ancient Roman Pliny (NH 6. 61-62) and the ancient Greek Strabo (11.8.9). Both authors list the distances of routes traveled by Alexander the Great (r. 336-323 BC) as by his bematists Diognetus and Baeton. However, the high accuracy of the bematists's ...