50 years ago

To the young scientist making contact with industry or commerce fresh from school or university it comes as rather a shock to find that his general 'scientific' usage of the C.G.S. system has such small acceptance in the outside 'practical' world. True, he has used 'Winchester quarts' to hold his standard solutions made up in grams per litre, he has stirred with fractional h.p. motors and dabbled in foot-poundals and lb./sq. in. But he has learnt to think in metric units and centigrade degrees. He knows that engineers seem to be able to exist with other units, and he respects their attempts to decimalize the rather antique units that he finds them using. He will probably be surprised to learn that Great Britain narrowly missed adopting the metric system of weights and measures almost one hundred years ago by a handful of votes in Parliament.

From Nature 7 June 1958.

100 years ago

A poll has just been taken by the Geological Society to ascertain the opinion of the fellows resident in the United Kingdom as to the admission of women to the society. The number of voting papers sent out was 870, and 477 replies were received. An analysis of the votes shows that 248 fellows were in favour of the admission of women as fellows and 217 against their admission, but of this number only 133 voted against the admission of women at all, the remaining eighty-four being in favour of their admission as associates. The fact that there was a majority of thirty-one in favour of the admission of women as fellows should be an encouraging sign to the increasing number of women who are taking up scientific work and in other ways contributing to the extension of natural knowledge.

From Nature 4 June 1908.