the foot was officially defined in terms of the new metric standards being adopted
overseas. In the United States, the Metric Act of 1866 further defined the foot as equal
to exactly 1200/3937 meter, or about 30.48006096 centimeters; this unit of measure-
ment is still used for geodetic surveying purposes in the United States, and is called
the survey foot. By 1959, the United States National Bureau of Standards redefined the
foot to equal exactly 30.48 centimeters, or about 0.999998 survey feet. This definition
was also adopted in Britain by the Weights and Measures Act of 1963; thus, a foot, or
30.48 centimeters, is also called an international foot.What were some early measurements of weight?
Some of the early measurements of weight include the grain, pound,and ton.Ancient
peoples used stones, seeds, and beans to measure weight, but grain (such as wheat or
barleycorn) was a favorite. In fact, the grain(abbreviated “gr”) is still one of the small-
46 est units of weight used today (to compare, one pound equals 7,000 grains).
Who developed the idea of a foot in measurement?
T
here is quite a mystery about who first developed the foot as a measurement
unit. One story, which most scholars believe is a legend, is that a foot was the
length of Charlemagne’s (742–814) foot. Charlemagne (also known as Charles
the Great) was King of the Franks and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Standing at six feet four inches tall, he probably had a really big foot.
Still another story involves England’s King Henry I (1068–1135), in which
the length of an armbecame important. Henry I ruled that the standard foot
would be one-third of his 36-inch-long arm. This thus became the origin of our
standardized unit of 12 inches to a foot, the inch being one thirty-sixth of a yard.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,the first confirmed usage of the
word “foot” as a unit of measurement also occurred during the reign of Henry I.
In honor of his arm, he ordered that an “Iron Ulna” (the ulna being the longer,
inner bone in the forearm) be made. This iron stick represented the master stan-
dard yard for the entire kingdom.
But around 1324, in response to his subjects’ cries for an even more stan-
dard measurement, England’s King Edward II (1284–1327) changed things
again. Recognizing the “Iron Ulna” was not universally available, he declared
that “3 barleycorns, round and dry make an inch,” and that 12 inches (or 36 bar-
leycorns) would equal one foot.
It’s interesting to note that even shoe sizes were tied to King Edward II and
barleycorns. He declared that the difference between one shoe size to the next
was the length of one barleycorn.