Abstract
ON June 2, 1897, in his well-known address to the Victoria Institute on “The Age of the Earth”, Lord Kelvin said : “I must first ask you to excuse my giving you all my depths, heights, and distances, in terms of the kilometre, being about six-tenths of that very inconvenient measure the English statute mile, which with all the other monstrosities of our British metrical system, will, let us hope, not long survive the legislation of our present Parliamentary session destined to honour the sixty years' Jubilee of Queen Victoria's reign by legalising the French metrical system for the United Kingdom”. The Weights and Measures (Metric System) Act was passed, and it is no longer a punishable offence for a tradesman to have in his possession a weight or measure of the decimal system. But with all the “monstrosities of our British metrical system” still surviving, it is interesting to recall the fiftieth anniversary of Lord Kelvin's unfulfilled hope.
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Lord Kelvin and the British Metrical System. Nature 159, 805 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/159805c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/159805c0