Yet when we all see road signs, we are expected to know whether 800 yards is more or less than half a mile.
#United kingdom to regress imperial measures driver#
Practically every driver of working age in the UK, went through school without ever being taught how many yards are in a mile. We learn to measure our world in centimetres and metres. We are taught that 1000 grams is 1 kilogram, and that 1000 metres is 1 kilometre. Science classes have been exclusively metric for much longer. Speed limits around the worldįor nearly 50 years, lessons in all UK schools, involving any form of measurement, have been in metric units. The remaining exceptions however, are highly visible.
With the exception of a few specific uses, the metric system is now the UK’s official system of weights and measures. To further delay doing so would have put the country at a commercial disadvantage in a world where the adoption of common international standards, including measurement units, was becoming increasingly important for trade and industry.īy the end of the 20th century, metrication in many sectors of the UK economy had been sucessfully completed. However, it wasn’t until 1965 that the British Government finally committed to ending the perplexing mix of official measurement units in the UK, and to switch completely to the metric system. Thus, although the metric system is essentially an international system of measurement units, it can be considered very much to be a British system.īritish Standards Institution metrication logo – 1968 In the modern iteration of the metric system, the International System of Units (SI), no less than six SI units are named in honour of British scientists, including the kelvin – the only SI base unit to be named after a person. In 1879, the British firm Johnson Matthey manufactured the platinum-iridium International Prototype Kilogram – the artefact that, until 2019, defined the mass of one kilogram. Meanwhile, British scientists played an important role in the continuing development of the metric system itself.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, various sectors in the UK began to adopt the metric system. Many of the elements of what became the modern metric system were first published by the British scientist John Wilkins in 1668. The desire for a universal easy-to-use decimal system of measurement however, had existed in the UK for much longer. Following an initial proposal to adopt the metric system, put to Parliament in 1790, metric weights and measures were first permitted for trade by the Weights and Measures Act of 1864. It is a process that is largely complete in the UK, but remains unfinished.Ĭontrary to popular belief, metrication in the UK has been underway since the 19th century. Metrication is the process of switching to the metric system of weights and measures.
0 kommentar(er)
