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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 imperial system of units was developed and used in the United Kingdom and its empire beginning in 1824. The metric system has, to varying degrees, replaced the imperial system in the countries that once used it. Most of the units of measure have been adapted in one way or another since the Norman Conquest (1066).
Volume may be measured either in terms of units of cubic length or with specific volume units. The units of cubic length (the cubic inch, cubic foot, cubic mile, etc.) are the same in the imperial and US customary systems, but they differ in their specific units of volume (the bushel, gallon, fluid ounce, etc.).
The United Kingdom's system of measures evolved by 1824 to create the imperial system (with imperial units), which was officially adopted in 1826, changing the definitions of some of its units. Consequently, while many U.S. units are essentially similar to their imperial counterparts, there are noticeable differences between the systems.
The chain is the unit of linear measurement for the survey of the public lands as prescribed by law. All returns of measurement in the rectangular system are made in the true horizontal distance in links, chains, and miles. The only exceptions to this rule are special requirements for measurement in feet in mineral surveys and townsite surveys ...
Detail of the cubit rod in the Museo Egizio of Turin, showing digit, palm, hand and fist lengths. The hand, sometimes also called a handbreadth or handsbreadth, is an anthropic unit, originally based on the breadth of a male human hand, either with or without the thumb, [2] or on the height of a clenched fist.
The British imperial system uses a stone of 14 lb, a long hundredweight of 112 lb and a long ton of 2,240 lb. The stone is not a measurement of weight used in the US. The US customary system uses the short hundredweight of 100 lb and short ton of 2,000 lb. Where these systems most notably differ is in their units of volume.
Other common terms used in machining with Imperial units involve adding tenths together to achieve a specific tolerance or measurement. For example, "five tenths," is typically a measurement or tolerance of five ten-thousandths of an inch, and written as 0.0005 inches. "Three tenths," as another example, is written as 0.0003 inches. [9]