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The Weights and Measures Act 1824 invalidated the various different gallons in use in the British Empire, declaring them to be replaced by the statute gallon (which became known as the imperial gallon), a unit close in volume to the ale gallon.
Imperial units, units of measurement of the British Imperial System, the official system of weights and measures used in Great Britain from 1824 until the adoption of the metric system in 1965. The U.S. Customary System of weights and measures is derived from it.
The imperial system of measurement or the British imperial system is the system of measurement defined in the UK after the Weights and Measures Act of 1824 and 1878. These include units that were in common use in Britain like inches, pounds, gallons, etc.
In the United States the US Treasury rather than Congress took the lead in establishing a standard system of weights and measures. The imperial and US customary measurement systems are both derived from an earlier English system of measurement which in turn can be traced back to Ancient Roman units of measurement, and Carolingian and Saxon ...
The main imperial weights you will encounter in day-to-day life are the ounce (oz), pound (lb) and stone (st). 16 ounces are in a pound, allowing division by 2, 4 and 8. The stone provides a unit ideally sized for human weights in between the pound and the next unit up, the hundredweight (cwt).
The Weights and Measures Act that came into effect during the reign of George IV in 1824 set out to overhaul such generalisations and establish a precisely defined uniformity of measurements.
See British Imperial System. Finally, by an act of Parliament in 1963, all the English weights and measures were redefined in terms of the metric system, with a national changeover beginning two years later.