wheel question.. why is width and diameter in inches but

[Alex Kowalski]

I appreciate the willingness to spread the blame around, and I was probably a little simplistic in that answer, but I don't think we should get into a fight over who was more responsible for bad decisions in measurement systems.

For those who are interested, Claude Shannon, an American who vastly extended Englishman George Boole's work into the modern science of information theory that allows you to receive this message, once built a computer called Throbac that calculated in roman numerals.  Of course, that was an act of whimsy.

http://www.research.att.com/~njas/doc/ces5.html

Two steps forward, three steps back.

The U.S. should have run with Carter's advice and pushed harder for widespread adoption of the metric system.  We're still dealing with the consequences of that lack of effort today in the United States.  Schoolchildren still have to learn two completely incompatible systems.  

I vividly remember a conversation around 1977 that I overheard between my father and a mechanic concerning the metric system.  The mechanic's opinion was:  "It has too many bugs in it."

Which, precisely?

Cheers,
Alex Kowalski
'87 5KCSTQ

>From mikemk40 at yahoo.com  Tue Mar 15 08:21:19 2005
>From: mikemk40 at yahoo.com (mike)
>Date: Tue Mar 15 08:21:20 2005
>Subject: wheel question.. why is width and diameter in inches but
>In-Reply-To: 6667
>Message-ID: <20050315132117.90927.qmail at web14205.mail.yahoo.com>
>
>I like the furlongs per fortnight unit but, at the
>risk of coming back to the thread title, I think it's
>to do with tyres. In the old days (when Britain ruled
>the waves) wheels and tyres, (crossply in those days)
>were both done in inches. 
>
>When Michelin invented radials (mid 60?s?) they, being
>French, sized them in mm but had to keep the inch
>wheel part to allow radials to be fitted to all the
>existing wheels. 
>
>A few car companies have done metric wheels (Rover in
>this country) but they have never caught on, largely
>because of limited tyre choice and at the risk of
>copyright problems ?if it ain?t broke......?
>
>Mike
>
>--- Alex Kowalski <akowalsk at comcast.net> wrote:
>> It's not a stupid question.  The simple answer is
>> that Jimmy Carter tried to convert the United States
>> to the metric system.  The only people who used the
>> metric system at that time were engineers and
>> scientists who were looking for something
>> complicated like a universal, base-ten measurement
>> system with which they could communicate with their