[aprssig] Re: Metric [[furlongs per fortnight]]

Ray Wells vk2tv at exemail.com.au
Thu Sep 6 23:53:28 EDT 2007


Jan T. Pharo wrote:

>Ben Lindner <vk5jfk at activ8.net.au>, Fri, 07 Sep 2007 05:13:38 +0930:
>
>  
>
>>A kilo foot would be 1012 inches correct :-)
>>    
>>
>
>Hardly, if "kilo" is 1000 (it is).
>a foot is 12 inches.
>a kilofoot (k') is 1000' i.e. 12000".
>
>  
>
An inch is one-twelfth of a foot.

The foot is a unit of measure with the base unit being 1.

Therefore a kilofoot (Kft) is 1000 feet.

12000 is a kilofoot expressed in inches.

Inches were further divided by 10, 100 and 1000, or, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 
64. Twist drills were the latter whilst engineers used a micrometer 
calibrated in thousandths of an inch. You figure it out!

Metric units may not be for everyone but we did one really useful thing 
when we decimalised our currency, which used to be pounds, shillings and 
pence. 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound. Of course, 
if you're old enough we had half-pennies and even earlier, farthings 
which were a quarter of a penny. Now we don't even have 1 and 2 cent 
coins, although those still lingering about are still legal tender. Our 
smallest coin is now the 5 cent piece.

We managed to make a lot of wealthy people millionaires overnight on the 
14th February 1966, when decimal currency was introduced, because the 
pound became 2 dollars.

Ray vk2tv





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