Units

[cdspk]

I'm used to seeing feet, inches and pounds usedin this forum but had kind of assumed it was a legacy thing, I was quite surprised to learn that (as one of the last three countries with Burma and Liberia) the US still has imperial units as its official measurement system.

From a professional point of view it would be useful to know whether US college engineering students are taughtat all inSI units aswe're starting to see a lot more US graduates here in the UK,

Cheers, Sean

[rreifsnyder]

This happened in the late 70's and early 80's when Detroit was trying to start their switchover to metric. They changed their tooling, but the mechanics all had English tools, thus the metric threads with English heads.

It's actually less about what manufacturers work in, or the government, it's how the people insist how the labels are marked. They can deal with a 2 liter bottle of soda, but the standard individual serving is 12 oz. cans or bottles.

BTW, the 1866 law simply allowed the metric system to be used, it did not make the metric system the U.S. standard.


Rob Reifsnyder
Mechanical Design Engineer/ Pro/E Librarian
L
Mission Systems & Sensors (MS2)
497 Electronics Parkway
Liverpool, NY 13088
EP5-Quad2, Cube 281

[merrill.rosenow]

The irony with how "we all use the metric system" is that the European Unions attempt to have all their products sold only with metric measurements did not come to pass.... in Europe of all places!

[JWayman]

Bizarrely, shopkeepers have been prosecuted in England for marking and
selling potatoes by the pound instead of the kg, even only a couple of years
ago. See



for details.

I still ask for a quarter of cheese, not 100g, mentally convert the price of
a litre of petrol into the price for a (UK) gallon and have no real idea of
how fast 100km/hr is. I suppose it's just habit.

John

[StephenW]

John said the magic word...HABIT...I habitually do the conversion in my head for mm to inches or kg to lbs (mass or force, oh I'm so confused, stupid imperial measurement system).

[ptc-593619]

That's great but I have yet to get my head around the "dyne" and the
"erg"..... let alone the "weber" - which I thought was a grill, the
"Henry" - the eighth I presume and the "pascal" which sounds like a
French skunk - and don't get me started on that "Kelvin" guy just when I
have got over Celsius changing from Centigrade.
oh I'm so confused, stupid metric measurement system.