As the title says really, I can work with many different measurements (full inches, feet, yards, metres, mm etc ) but I’ve always struggle when it comes to imperial measurements of fractions of an inch. Why did people use this measurement because to me it seems a crazy way to measure something!
In: Engineering
Inch doesn’t have any proper subunits and unlike the SI/metric system, the American/Imperial system of units doesn’t have any build in ways to create subunits.
A sent anything better the traditional method is to subdivide the inch into fractions based on powers of two: halves, quarters, fourths, eights etc.
These have the advantage of being easy to construct geometrically, even if they are more cumbersome to do math with than metric based powers of ten. They also don’t lend themselves to going too small as nobody measures things in 1024th of an inch and are completely divorced from any sort of volume measurements, but for measuring length of human sized objects it is a system that is good enough.
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