Petrograd Standard

One hundred and sixty-five cubic feet of sawn softwood, and the standard measure of the Baltic timber import trade.

Britain never grew enough softwood for its own construction, and from the seventeenth century onward the shortfall came from the Baltic: Russian, Finnish and Swedish deals shipped through St Petersburg, Riga and Gothenburg. The importing measure was set at the Russian end and adopted wholesale by British merchants, which is why a unit named for a Russian city governed the timber yards of every British port. It is defined as 120 pieces measuring 12 feet by 11 inches by 1.5 inches, which multiplies out to 165 cubic feet, and the peculiar specificity reflects the actual dimensions in which deals were sawn.