With the UK government consulting on the partial restoration of imperial units, it is worth reflecting on the country's fraught relationship with metrication - and the engineers who were almost always a step ahead. IT WAS NOT ALL THAT long ago that a unit of grain could differ almost from one village to the next. This worked in a smaller, pre-industrial world, or at least it worked well enough. In a world of cross-border trade and empirical scientific practice, it was no longer tenable.
展开▼
