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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]
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.
This definition was approved by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand through the international yard and pound agreement of 1959, and corresponds with the previous 1930s British and American definitions of 1 inch being 25.4 mm. In all systems, a yard is 36 inches.
The Magna Carta of 1215 stipulates that there should be a standard measure of volume for wine, ale and corn (the London Quarter), and for weight, but does not define these units. [6] Later development of the English system was by defining the units in laws and by issuing measurement standards. Standards were renewed in 1496, 1588, and 1758. [7]
The act also reaffirmed the use of the brass standard yard and platinum standard pound as the standards for use in the United Kingdom, reaffirmed the use of apothecaries measures in the pharmaceutical industry, reaffirmed the 1824 definition of the gallon, removed the Troy pound from the list of legal units of measure, added the fathom to the ...
The Act defines the four primary units of measurement as the metre or the yard (defined in terms of the metre) for length, and the kilogram or pound (defined in terms of the kilogram) for mass. The Act also requires standard physical examples to be maintained (known as "United Kingdom primary standards") for each of the four primary units.
The informal public imperial measurement standards erected at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, London, in the 19th century: 1 British yard, 2 feet, 1 foot, 6 inches, and 3 inches. The inexact monument was designed to permit rods of the correct measure to fit snugly into its pins at an ambient temperature of 62 °F (16.66 °C ).
In antiquity, systems of measurement were defined locally: the different units might be defined independently according to the length of a king's thumb or the size of his foot, the length of stride, the length of arm, or maybe the weight of water in a keg of specific size, perhaps itself defined in hands and knuckles. The unifying ...