[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
More information about the aprssig
mailing list