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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.
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]
As a result, Canadian bottles are labelled as 11.5 fl oz in US units when imported into the United States. Because the standard size of Canadian beer bottles predates the adoption of the metric system in Canada, the bottles are still sold and labelled in Canada as 341 mL.
The British standard ordnance weights and measurements for the artillery were established by the Master General of Ordnance in 1764, and these were not altered until 1919, [citation needed] when the metric system was additionally introduced.
The British Weights and Measures Act 1824 repealed all existing British weights and measures legislation, some dating back to the 1300s, and redefined existing units of measure. In particular, a new standard yard and troy pound were manufactured as the standards for length and weight respectively.
Transport infrastructure standards were metricated using soft conversions, as part of the general metrication of the engineering industry. The standard railway track gauge, fixed at 4 feet 8 + 1 ⁄ 2 inches (1,435.1 mm) in 1845, [94] was redefined as 1,435 mm [95] – a nominal decrease of 0.1 mm but within the engineering tolerances.
British Standard Whitworth (BSW) is an imperial-unit-based screw thread standard, devised and specified by Joseph Whitworth in 1841 and later adopted as a British Standard. It was the world's first national screw thread standard, and is the basis for many other standards, such as BSF , BSP , BSCon , and BSCopper .
British media also frequently uses the football pitch for equivalent purposes, although soccer pitches are not of a fixed size, but instead can vary within defined limits (100–130 yd or 91.4–118.9 m long, and 50–100 yd or 45.7–91.4 m wide, giving an area of 5,000 to 13,000 sq yd or 4,181 to 10,870 m 2).