A note on inches and feet

When interpreting historical writings it is important to understand that not all measures are created equal. If a bench from 1790 is 10 feet long, is it really 10 feet long? Is a German 10 foot bench the same as an English 10 foot bench?

The ancients took measures of lengths from the limbs of the human body. For example Vitruvius (born 80-70BC), a Roman architect and engineer described the foot corresponds to one-sixth of the total height of a human. The British foot remained the same since the 14th century, i.e. 304.8mm. Prior to the influx of the Anglo-Saxons, the English used the Roman foot, 11.65 inches (296mm). The Roman foot consisted of 12 unciae (twelfths), and was either called a pes (foot) or an as. An as was originally a copper bar, measuring 1 foot in length and weighing 1 as (an as was also called a libra, from which we get lb for a pound). A unciae was then an inch. The actual length of the Roman foot is up for discussion. It is normally considered to be 296mm, or 11.65 inches, however it has been recorded anywhere from 290-300mm. R.D. Connor in The Weights and Measures of England measured nine Roman folding foot rules found in southern England, and obtained an average measure of 292.9mm (290-294.5mm).

Wherever the conquering Roman legions went, they took with them their systems of weights and measures. Since Roman conquests covered most regions in Europe and beyond, Roman units of measurement became almost universally used in the western world. During the Anglo-Saxon period it is likely that several differing lengths were being used, from the Roman foot, to the Rhineland foot at 314mm (eq. 12.3557 inches), to the North-German foot of 13.2 inches (335mm). The term unciae became ince, or ynce in Old English, which eventually evolved into inch.

A barleycorn inch

It was not the foot that became the standard measure, but rather the yard, with the foot a mere subdivision. The foot was defined in The Statute for the Measuring of Land, around the time of Edward I, AD 1305 – ‘It is ordained that three grains of barley, dry and round, make an inch; 12 inches make a foot; 3 feet make an ‘ulna’ (yard); 5½ ulne make a perch, and 40 perches in length, and 4 perches in breadth make an acre’. The length of a barleycorn likely didn’t change much over the millennium, at 8.47mm. An inch was legally defined as a fraction of a yard. The Scottish inch was different again. Scottish King David I (1084-1153) decreed that the Scottish inch was to be based on the average width of the thumbs of three men – a large, a medium and a small man. The Scottish inch was close, at 305.3mm.

The same could not be said of European inches. German Fuß, or feet, varied somewhat in size from place to place in the German speaking world. For instance at the time of writing “Ökonomische Encyklopädie”, its author Dr. Johann Georg Krünitz (1728-1796) suggested that the Rhineland foot was commonly used in Germany (12.3557 inches). He also suggests the use of other measures such as the French ‘royal’ or Parisian foot (measured by a permanent iron measure in Paris). The Parisian foot is divided into 12 inches, an inch into 12 lines, and a line into 12 parts, giving a total of 1440 parts. A Parisian foot is equivalent to 1.06575 modern feet or 324.84mm. The second measure he mentioned is the English or London foot. The Rhineland foot was smaller than the Parisian, and larger than the English (27 Parisian feet = 28 Rhineland feet, and 69 English feet make about 67 Rhineland ones).

The 120 parts of a Parisian inch

The book also provides a list of comparisons to the Parisian foot, base on its 1440 constituent parts. For example Berlin (1373), Brussels (1290), Denmark (1391), Palermo (1073), ancient Roman (1306), Switzerland (1330), Vienna (1420). Measures were converted from one region to another using this convention. Another source from 1830 [1] shows the variation of feet in the German speaking world. It ranged from 236mm (9.29”) in Wesel (Prussia), to 480mm (18.90”) in Cremona (Austria).

Further reading

1. Johann Friedrich Krüger, “Vollständiges handbuch der münzen, masse und gewicht aller länder der erde” (1830)

What did we loose with machines?

“Machine-shop methods have never yet produced and will never produce craftsmen who are mechanically and artistically equal to those of the best periods of history. Of course this is an industrial age, and our material progress so far has depended largely on the harnessed power of steam, electricity, etc., but in a measure this has been at the expense of the individual. No system of education or progress can afford to miss the lessons of the great periods in craftsmanship, when the individual workers put their soul, feelings and emotions into the work of their hands in stone, metal and wood. We are far from equaling the buildings and masonry of the past, and our mechanics and common people scarcely realize what artistic excellence means in metal, stone and wood.”

James Liberty Tadd in his book New Methods in Education (1899)