Abstract
IN his recent presidential address to the Philosophical Society of Washington,1 Mr. L. A. Fischer, of the Bureau of Standards, gave an interesting historical account of standards of linear measure. He explained the intimate relation which existed between the American and the British official standard of length up to the year 1893. At present the yard is defined in the United States in terms of the metre, but the numerical ratio adopted agrees very closely with that legalised in this country. In fact, the American yard only differs from the British standard by about 0.000l in. Until 1856 the United States official standard of the yard was for more than forty years a length of 36 in. on an 82-in. brass bar made by Troughton, which had been brought from London by Ferdinand Hassler, the first superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Between 1856 and 1893 a bronze yard presented to the United States by the British Government in 1855 was recognised by the Office of Weights and Measures at Washington as the national standard.
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Length Standards and Measurements . Nature 95, 302–303 (1915). https://doi.org/10.1038/095302a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/095302a0