Isn't it funny that our system of measurement is referred to as "English?" Wonder where that comes from? With all the metric measurements now in the UK, someone might think the French and Germans won the wars. ;-)

In my career, I constantly deal with something known as BTU's. The "B" stands for "British."

I once had an English professor (no, he didn't teach "English", he was an aeronautical engineer) who said the reason the metric system didn't work for manufacturing was that it couldn't be divided into thousandths. I didn't think to ask him how the Germans made out so well over the years, but nevertheless, that was still his perspective on measurements.

Maybe we should talk about the differences between the dollar and the pound? How do you divide up the pound and remember the divisions? ;-)

Oh - by the way - I am 2nd generation English. :-)

I share your woe when it comes to having to deal with unfamiliar measurements. For me it comes up not so much in gardening day to day, but often in tools and construction, where some measurements are in inches, others im millimeters, and still others are part of the secret brotherhood that realizes a 2x4 piece of lumber is not in fact 2x4, but that lumber measurements are different than what they are listed by but it is an exact difference so one has to look up the actual specifications when planning to build.

Here is a link that might be useful: Conversions

Campanula, to add confusion to the issue, the nursery pots are not accurately named for their volume. What I call a "2gal nursery pot" actually holds 1.6 gallons. They all hold less than their name would imply. See the link below to the place where I buy my nursery pots, and scroll down to "Specifications" to see what their volumes actually are.

:-)

~Christopher

Here is a link that might be useful: Greenhouse Megastore Nursery Containers

You had to ask! Pot sizes in the US conform to no system but their own. A 1-gal pot is nowhere near a gallon of anything. Off the top of my head, I'd say it is about 1.5 liters. A 5-gallon is closer to five gallons, or about 19 liters. A band is a about 1.5 cups, depending upon the size of the mug you use. A 3" pot is about 1 cup. Clay pots do have a numbering system, which is duplicated in the plastic version. The higher the number the bigger the pot. The system is consistent even unto the trays. A #8 would be about 2 liters, but that's a guesstimate, as it is too cold for me to go out and actually measure any of this.

1 cup is 8 (fluid) ounces, which is .236 liters.

You can buy measuring cups with both systems on it. My favorite pastry recipes are French, so I have to go the opposite direction. I couldn't live w/o my dual system measuring cups.

Rosetom
had to laugh in amazement at your colleagues strange assertion regarding thousandths (or milli....or kilo?).
Oh Cats - I would guess yours is the most honest answer (but equally confusing)
and as for cooking, we are still wrestling with various spoons (tbsp, tsp, dsp) in the UK so am not claiming any superiority over american cups.
And yes, Lucille, that sneaky builder's system of measuring lumber - that arises because the measurements are from the newly sawn timber, before being planed smooth (PAR, planed all round), hence the amounts always being a bit less than stated....and curiously, it is the building industry which is most resistant to metrification (hence Mr.Camps, resistance)
It's a lark, hey?

Yes, I think the confusion mainly comes in not because someone is using a different measuring system, but because for whatever marketing purposes some industries (at least in the US) intentionally MIS use the measuring system. Examples above are "gallon" pots that are not, lumber that is smaller so that a "2 x 4" is not such thing. Re "cups", 8 fluid ounces is correct, but if you purchase a coffee making machine, beware. Some horrid convention has been established re coffee that a "cup" is 6 fluid ounces, or sometimes less.

My DH found a couple of lovely magnet thingies that I keep on my refrigerator door. They are metal, and about 3 " by 5 ". They convert ounces, tablespoons, cups, pints, quarts, gallons, etc. One of them even condescends to have metric measurements in there too. They are for recipes, so that when I am trying to quadruple (I have a lot of large family dinners) a recipe, I do not have to count out 12 tablespoons of something.

I was in 8th grade (age about 13) when they tried to drum the metric system into us - at that point the US had announced that we were definitely going on the metric system. But, in my opinion they went about it all wrong. Instead of just having the kids use it, for chemistry or whatever, where it is obvious how much easier it is, they spent all of their time making us memorize the conversion formulas! Stupid, stupid. Of course, because the "English" system is convoluted and confusing to begin with, the conversions are a nightmare! Even the formula to convert F temperatures to C temperatures is something I remember HATING.

I don't know if that is why (if you can't get the kids, you're doomed), but the attempt by the govt failed completely. People simply rejected it. I remember there was a time when measuring cups switched from having the "English" measurements on the "front" (if you were right handed), to the back side. For about 20 years I could only purchase measuring cups at yard or antique sales. Well, after that they magically switched back, so the metric measurements are on the back now.

One funny thing - when the US govt mandated that certain things like salt and sugar, calories, fat etc. must be on food labels, they idiotically said it had to be in mgs. Now they are whining about how much sugar is in coke, pepsi, etc. Most people here have NO idea what a mg is, but if you told them that a can of soda contained 12 ounces of sugar, they would get it immediately and be shocked. So, as usual, the govt has shot itself in the foot.

Jackie

There is a thing called a 'dry gallon'. It is a different measure than the usual gallon, meant for measuring liquid. The same exists for measuring cups, and liquid measuring cups. They are not identical (though most people think they are). Pots are measured in dry gallons. A lot of potting soil is sold in dry quarts.

Yesterday, I was making a sweet roll recipe from the New York Times. Their latest thing is to list amounts of dry ingredients in grams. For some things it works great. Most notably brown sugar, which I'm never sure how much to smash into the cup. For others, like baking powder, it just seems strange, and is too much for my analog kitchen scale to handle.

This post was edited by mad_gallica on Fri, Mar 22, 13 at 10:29

This may not mean much to those outside of science and engineering, but I remember so many lectures and work assignments that used the metric system (mid-to-late 70's) and claimed it made so much more sense because the product of kg (m) and acceleration (a) resulted in a "true" quanitity of force (F) - Newtons (F=ma). (Force is commonly expressed as weight.) Those of us "cursed" with the English system were always worrying over converting between pounds of mass (lbm) vs. pounds of force (lbf) when they were two distinct quanitities. There's even a famous constant that was invented to deal with the differences - the gravitational constant, "Gc." It was/is a real hassle in statics, mechanics, thermodynamics, etc.

Unfortunately, every metric system I've seen in real practice still uses kilograms for weight (force) and mass. In fact, they use the same regressive practice as pounds in the English system and make distinctions between kgm (kilograms-mass) vs. kgf (kilograms-force). This again results in the need of a constant to convert between the two.

At least from the perspective of my industry, the advantages of conversion to the metric system was a lie. ;-)

One of the things we brought back with us from Denmark when my grandmother sold her house, was her wall mount scale. So easy to spoon the right weight in to a bowl and not get out your cups and spoons and poke for air pocks, level with the right knife....etc

Of course, this leaves me either doing the conversions or learning Danish and using their cookbooks....

I think that old recipes are one of the main reasons I would never want only metric measuring devices - imagine having to re-calculate everything! I even have some old Pennsylvania Dutch recipes I got from my friend's grandmother that call for "butter the size of an egg", which is left over from when butter came out of large crocks, and you rolled it with paddles. Now all I need is to know what size eggs were in the late 19th century!

I have some very old cook books, and they refer to oven temps as "cool", "warm", or "hot", or sometimes "slow", or "fast". One has an index, and when I looked up the definitions, it measured the temps as a function of how long it took a piece of paper put into the oven to turn what color! I did figure those out for the recipes I use, and added notes to them. Another favorite (mostly from my Mother's recipes) is "cook it until it is done", or until a knife inserted in it does..... When I first started making custard, I had no idea if it was closer to 20 minutes, or to an hour. Some things still need to be learned by experience!

Jackie

David Austin sells that green pot as a 3 gallon here.
Even we Americans are confused as to pot size, or at least I am. It has to do with Bushels. 8 gallons in a bushel basket. Which means a 10 gallon container should be 1.25 bushel baskets.
We had huge bushel baskets for fruit picking when I was a kid- they were laundry basket size. I wonder if they were 5 bushels or something? I am so confused.

well...they could call them short, small, grande and vente to really mess with us. (Starbucks)

There are some really old country cooking books ( US )I occasionally find hard to use because they made such enormous batches. Apparently they only made 20 dozen cookies at a time. Those are hard to know how to cut down when you don't have 12 kids and 8 ranch hands to feed even if you understand the measurements.

This post was edited by lola-lemon on Fri, Mar 22, 13 at 14:07

Wow, Camp, it never occurred to me you couldn't just go out and buy a measuring cup with both ounces and metric on it. Shall I send you one? As for butter, here we can buy it by the pound with the pound divided into four "sticks" of butter, 1/4 pound each. Half a stick equals 1/4 cup; one whole stick equals 1/2 cup. A pound is two cups (don't know as I've ever used that much butter). How is your butter marketed?

There is no standardized system for pot measurements as far as I can tell. I look on line for pots all the time and one site will have them in gallon sizes by volume (which of course are not an accurate measure anyway) and the next will have them all measured in inches for size. I just use my best guess as to what looks like the right size for the plant I have and go from there.

I'm glad I'm an old biddy and won't have to deal with changing over to the metric system in my lifetime probably. When someone says a yard long I have an exact mental picture of that distance in my head. When someone says a meter long I'm in no man's land. And I fail to see how Celsius can be better than Fahrenheit when it seems to clump 3 or 4 degrees of F into one C?

Seil, one good thing about Celsius is that the freezing point is 0 degrees which seems to make a lot more sense than 32 degrees being freezing. I wonder how they came up with that rather arbitrary measure.

1 gallon =small
3 gallon = medium
7 gallon=big
10 gallon = to big for me to lift

It's hopeless, isn't it? Although I do find some of these archaic terms quite charming (ells, fathoms, knots, rods, chains, leagues, pecks, gills and so on).......but there is the tricky problem of equivalences between weight and volume. I do have an old-fashioned tin measuring jug which has delineations for rice, sugar (castor) sugar, (demerara), flour, water, eggs which is brilliantly helpful (when I can be bothered, I usually just toss and heap, making a vague guess). It was actually the size description of Austin pots which started me on this train of thought since they are never 3 gallons (24 pints!), wet, dry or in cubic anything....unless this really is a totally anomalous US thing.
I buy butter in a 250gramme block (although Reubs refers to them as half a pound). Also, I tend to base pot sizes on diameters rather than volume but these are the most common sizes - 9cm(3.5"- .5 Litre) 13cm (5in- 1lt) 15cm (6in- 3lt) and 20cm (8in- 5 lt)

Don't know if it's the real deal but it is an entertaining story...

Here is a link that might be useful: Fahrenheit entertainment

I like the cubit ( distance from elbow to end of middle finger ) and feet and inches and all. It makes life interesting. Why hasn't the year been put on a system of 10 yet by someone? But there would be a fight over which months would have to go.

I like naming the days of the week by the old way- Sun's, Moon's, Tiu's, Wotan's, Thor's, Freya's and Saturn's. I always plant and prune my apples on Freya's day because she grew apples. Our history is so interesting and I don't want it to be forgotten and become purely mathematical or scientific.

Camps, you bring up some interesting topics, can I throw this one in, "spelling", color=colour and many other differences

Lucille, if your Fahrenheit story is true it's pretty funny. ...the blind leading the blind lol.

Camps...speaking of measurements and England

Back in the mid 80's we went to London, we had our tour book that showed photos of the various coins. I had spent a lot of time in Denmark so dealing with different currency was no big deal. Pounds and Pence no problem....but shillings? those were not listed in our book. We were so bummed every time we got one in our change... We had a big jar of them by the end of the trip. Last day we went on a tour and giggled the whole way out the door as we dumped out stash of shillings off on the poor driver....turns out we might have been the best tippers of the day LOL

My favorite archaic measurement term is "stone", as in "Diane weighs too many stone."
And I swear I'm going to compile a list of Britishisms to use for replacement of all the stale American slang I'm tired of hearing and saying myself. Here's to "faffing about", my current favourite! Diane

Love all these stories as they drift away from the original topic.

Campanula I always start to smile before reading your posts. Your writing is so crisp and there are always humorous tidbits scattered throughout. I have often thought that I would like very much to live overseas, somewhere in the British Isles in particular, but that now in retirement I would be hopelessly lost trying to figure out the metric system and a menace trying to drive on the other side of the road. Also I'm cool weather challenged. I agree cups etc. is wonky logic but it's too late for me. Mary

Interesting reading, Lucille. But really all of our measurement systems are arbitrary made up settings. And that cubit you like, Kitty, was the length from the elbow to the finger tip of the CURRENT pharaoh. So it changed all the time. I measure fabric yardage fairly accurately all the time by holding the fabric up to my nose and out the length of my arm, one yard. I'm usually within an inch even for a several yard long piece. It still seems as though some how Celsius isn't as accurate because it has a lot fewer increments in it. I live on the US Canadian border and get Canadian TV. I watch their news casts occasionally and the weather forecasts drive me nuts. It's more a psychological thing but 32 degrees just sounds so much warmer than 0. And when it's hot 90 degrees sounds a lot hotter than 32!

And then we measure horses by hands, one hand being four inches--the width of a man's hand back in the day.

And then we measure horses by hands, one hand being four inches--the width of a man's hand back in the day.

You have to admit that it's a handy idea.

Handy until you actually try to use your own hand to measure one! ;-)

You are all so clever!

I learned from a woodworker at a local craftsman's fair that you can use the parts of your hand to measure things accurately. If you bend your fingers, you can use the distance between the knuckles. I can measure an exact inch one one of mine. It's useful because then if I need to know a half inch or a quarter inch, I just take some scrap paper and make a crease at one inch, and then fold it to find the other fractions.

The wood worker was so amazing, he could judge by sight very small increments. He made beautiful arts & crafts/ art noveau furniture from recycled wood with hand carved jointing and inlay.