Friday, July 13, 2007
The Metric System - We Are All Guilty
The news that an Englishman invented the dastardly metric system 120 years before the French got round to it comes as a bit of a blow. The story has a pleasingly English aspect though: the work which contains this precocious description of the metric system - the Rt Rev John Wilkins' An Essay Towards A Real Character And A Philosophical Language - is so stupefyingly tedious that no one, even at the Royal Society, noticed it was there. Or maybe the idea was just so obviously French that it simply could not register on an honest English mind.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Stone the crows! An Englishman invented the metric system? Hard to fathom. Impossible. Not an ounce of truth in it. Pound to a pinch there's a Frenchman behind this preposterous rumour.
ReplyDeleteWell quite, and at least Wilkins didn't take it into his head to suggest his crazy system had any conceivable practical application.
ReplyDeleteYea What he said!!!
ReplyDelete