Abstract
IF it were possible to make a clean sweep of British units of measurement and substitute for them the metric system, probably no one would benefit more than the surveyor and map maker. No one who has had practical experience in the use of the metric system would not prefer it to our complicated and almost barbaric weights and measures. Great Britain is the only country in Europe which has not adopted the metric system (though it was legalised in 1897). The U.S.S.R. adopted it as recently as 1927, and Japan in 1924. We should probably have had it now, had the metre not been identified with the French Revolution, which was not popular in England. The subject crops up every few years both in and out of Parliament. Select committees have discussed it, and on one occasion even recommended compulsion. But the dead weight of public opinion has always opposed every effort, and nothing has been done.
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British Maps and the Metric System: Proposed Grid for Ordnance Maps. Nature 137, 165–166 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137165a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137165a0