Scales & Systems

The everyday weight system, from a grain of barley to a ton of coal.

The system reserved for gold, silver and anything worth weighing precisely.

The mint standard that Henry VIII abolished.

The scale on which a mistake could kill someone.

Liquid medicine measured down to the drop.

From one sheep’s fleece to a merchant’s cargo.

Designated ports, fixed measures, and a Crown that took its cut of everything.

Measuring cloth across a counter, with the customer watching.

Yarn fineness measured by how far a pound will stretch.

A counting system built around how many sheets a printer would spoil.

Feet measured in barleycorns, and still are.

The shepherd’s count, in a language England stopped speaking fifteen centuries ago.

The first successful industrial standard anywhere in the world.

The thread on every British tap, boiler and gas fitting.

A thread invented for bicycles, and still on them.

The gauge that Birmingham used, and everyone else had to learn.

Two different scales, one name, and a great deal of confusion.

A separate gauge for sheet metal, because wire rules did not apply.

A sizing scale that runs the right way round, which is why it is not British.

A Scottish scale for liquids heavier than water.

The scale that decided how much tax your whisky owed.

Water hardness measured in grains per gallon.

A scale of coarseness with no numbers in it at all.

The reason your electricity bill still says "units".

The legal British wire scale, and it runs backwards.

One scale for everything from lead to diamond.

Measuring toughness by breaking things on purpose.

Viscosity measured by how long the oil takes to run out.

A chain that made land arithmetic possible without decimals.

The corn measure Britain abolished and America kept.

Two chaldrons, one commodity, and a factor of two between them.

A measure of wood defined by what a cart could pull.

Three different weights, and a law to stop the fraud.

A measurement designed to be wrong, by exactly the right amount.

A trade that counted in handfuls, all the way up to twelve thousand fish.

Wind measured not in speed, but in what a ship could carry.

A distance defined by the size of the Earth rather than by a king’s thumb.

How a sailor divided the sea, from arm span to horizon.

A depth scale you could read in the dark, by touch alone.

The measurement that gave the knot its name.

Beaufort measured the wind. Douglas measured what the wind had done to the sea.

The scale that made longitude a matter of time.

A tax formula that changed the shape of British ships.

The traditional English quarter days when everything fell due, and two countries that could not agree which four.

Consciousness reduced to a number between three and fifteen.

Britain has tornadoes, and a scale of its own for grading them.

Hail graded by what it breaks, not just by how big it is.