Joe Jones, age 12, of Asheville,, N.C., for his question:
Who discovered the yard, the: foot and the inch?
In 1324, King Edward II of England took time out from his troubles to decide what the length of the inch should be. It was settled us equal to three dried barleycorns, grains of barley, placed end to end. Henry II decided what the yard should be. He measured from the tip of his outstretched arm to his nose. In the 16th Century the Germans came up with an ingenious way to settle the length of the lawful foot, one sixteenth part of a lawful rood, or rod
A surveyor was told to stand at a church door on Sunday at noon. He was to take aside the first 16 men, tall and short, as they came out. They must line up with their 16 left feet toe to heel one behind the other. The total length was taken to be a lawful rood; one‑sixteenth of this measure was taken to be the lawful foot.
During the Middle ages, there were many such haphazard methods for finding standards for the inch, the foot and the yard, after all, long measures are manmade. There are no such units in nature. Counting in whole numbers can be easy anyone can tell where one sheep ends and another begins. But the length of a yard, where it begins and ends, are matters of opinion.
The Romans solved this problem with standard measures. These units were kept in a temple in Rome and copies of them used throughout the far flung Roman empire. But when Rome fell, these standards were lost. The various peoples of Europe had to make up their own measures and more often than not they did not agree with each other.
We use a system much like the old Roman system. In the Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C., there is a bar of metal exactly one meter long. It is an alloy of platinum and iridium, very durable, 1111 our standards of measure must tally with this measure. The yard is .914402 of the Standard meter.
The names of our units of long measures come, some from the Roman units that were lost and some from the haphazard English system inherited by the American colonies. The word mile is coined from Latin word's meaning 1,000 paces. A pace was a double step, about equal to five times the length of a man's foot. The ward inch comes from the Latin meaning a twelfth part, "Icre comes from the Latin meaning a field.
The word foot came from old England. Yes, and it was about equal to the length of 2 man's foot. The word yard, also from. the English, then, as now, equaled three feet, The rod, pole or perch measure referred to the pole used by the plowman to plow his first furrow. The furlong: meant furrow long, the length of a furrow. This is not so haphazard as it seems, for in feudal days each farmer owned a small strip of land and furrows were all more or less the; same length.
Some of these old measures have fallen into disuse or are used only to express distance in poetic terms. The rod, still used in land measure, is five‑and‑a‑half yards or sixteen‑and‑a‑half feet; 40 rods make a furlong and eight furlongs make a mile. Three miles make a league and sewn leagues, as everyone knows, make a giant stride ‑ though that last one never got into the table of long measure.