Abstract
THE standard of length measurement in any age gives us a fairly true picture of the general requirements of the time. King David of Scotland (c. A.D. 1150) ordained that the Scotch inch should be the mean measure of the thumbs of three men, “an merkle man, an man of measurable stature and an lyttel man”, the thumbs being measured at the root of the nail. The history of the transition to our present-day standards was admirably related by Sir Richard Glazebrook in his Guthrie lecture to the Physical Society in 1931.
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WILLIAMS, W. Light-Waves as Units of Length. Nature 135, 459–461 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135459a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135459a0
