The Hundredweight Furlong Fortnight System
Sheffield Web Designer's Idle Musings
- Blog: January 2009
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We Brits have recently had the metric 'mks' system forced upon us (mks referring to the fundamental units of measurement: the meter, kilogram and second). These of course replaced the old foot, pound and er... what did we measure time in? That's one reason why the imperial system was replaced - it was incomplete and hopelessly complicated. But what if we had a complete and logical imperial system every bit as good as the metric system? We have! The wonderfully eccentric and totally British, hundredweight, furlong, fortnight system. [read more...]
Basic units
The basic unit of length is the furlong which could possibly be defined as the distance you can run flat out before collpasing into a big heap! In fact the furlong is easily defined as the length of 10 cricket pitches. Weight is measured in hundredweights. You don't get very far buying a kilogram of potatoes - that's barely enough chips to feed a 'sparrer' in Yorkshire. The hundredweight (cwt) is a far more practical measure equalling, not 100lbs as the metricated continentals might expect, but 112lbs - almost enough to feed a growin' lad for a whole day. Which brings us to time. What sort of unit is a second? It's gone almost before it's started. More practical for the leisurely pace of life 'oop north', is the fortnight - the time it should properly take to decide a cricket match!
The hundredweight furlong fortnight system in practice
Everyday measurements take on a new life in the CFF system. A 30mph speed limit becomes a much more exciting 80,000 furlongs per fortnight, or 80 kilo-furlongs per fortnight. Your mother-in-law's weight is far more flattering at a mere 2.5cwt than 125kg or even 20st. And when did you last try counting down to your holidays in seconds? Every time you manage to work it out you have to start again. Far better to think of only 4 fortnights to go than some untold number of Mega-seconds.
Derived units
And it doesn't stop there either. The incontinentals have derived units for acceleration, force, power... all sorts. And so have we. The acceleration due to gravity (in Yorkshire) is approximately 71.33 giga-furlongs per fortnight squared. The energy required to raise a pint of bitter from the cellar to the bar is approximately 14.5 Mega hundredweight furlongs squared per fortnight squared. It is customary in the metric system to name complex derived units after famous scientists, so the unit of energy is the joule: named after James Prescott Joule, physicist and, coincidentally, brewer. (So he might well have invented rocket fuel before Goddard was allowed to play with matches!) In Yorkshire we should so honour our own famous sons and our unit of energy might respectfully be named the boycott. Since the above shows some 14.5 million boycotts being required to perform a fairly simple task it seems a fair choice.
Translating into familiar terms
Some measurements have long been given in nonesensical units: car fuel consumption for example. Miles per gallon is not only an upside down measurement (it gets smaller as you use more fuel - so lets use gallons per mile instead) but it's grossly overcomplicated. Dimensional analysis shows that it is in fact volume (length cubed) divided by length. This can be simplified to just length squared. In other words: area. A quick calculation turns the archaic 30mpg into a more succinct 23 pico-acres.
Now it's time for those nice men in white coats to come and make my cocoa. Goodnight!
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