Abstract
ON P. 355 of NATURE of May 20 Mr. M. E. Yeatman in a letter on the above subject says: “It seems that the advantage of any given system of weights or measures lies largely in the facilities that it offers for the division of a sum or quantity into equal parts”; and I have seen “facility of factorisation” claimed before as one of the merits of the British system. As an engineer who “figures frequently,” I fail to appreciate this fetish of factorisation. One uses a slide-rule and logs, and never worries about factors. Will Mr. Yeatman, or someone else, demonstrate the use of factors in practical calculations, bearing in mind the use of slide-rules, calculating machines, and logs?
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ACKERMANN, A. British and Metric Systems of Weights and Measures. Nature 105, 456 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/105456e0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/105456e0
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