Name: Speedometer and Odometer
Uploaded: 2019-07-19
Duration: 4 min 16 s
Description: A speedometer is a gauge that measures and displays the instantaneous speed of a vehicle. An odometer is an instrument used for measuring the distance travel...

Question

How do we determine distance and location?

Accepted Answer

The first recorded forms of measurement were based on the size of parts of the human body. In ancient Egypt, measurements were based on the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. This distance was known as the cubit and was further divided into smaller units such as the hand, which was the width of a palm the height of a horse is still measured in 'hands' today.Another division of the cubit was the foot, which represented the length of a human foot. The Roman Empire in particular extended these measurements across Europe and into Asia, and a Roman foot was divided into 12 unciae or, in English, inches - where an inch was thought to derive indirectly from the length of a finger from the first joint to the end. With time and some adjustments and standardizations - especially during the medieval and early renaissance periods - this became the 'common' or (from 1824) the British 'imperial' unit system. Imperial units are still in use today in some parts of the world such as the United States of America, and to some extent in the United Kingdom too, where traffic signs are marked in miles, for example. The revolution in France introduced a new calendar based on 10 months a year rather than the 12 inherited from ancient times, and in 1799 the revolutionary government created new standards of measurement for length and mass, called the metre and the kilogram.
These in turn were divided logically into units of $10, 100,$ or $1000$ , in the metric system. The measurements were standardized using a platinum rod and a mass, which were kept in the Archives de la République in Paris. In Britain in 1860 the physicists James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) (1824-1907) developed a system of units that aimed to derive all measurements from a small number of basic, metric units. This was the basis of the metric Système International (SI) units.

Paul Morris and Patricia Deo Solutions for Chapter: Where are We Now and Where Might We be Going?, Exercise 1: CONSIDER THESE QUESTIONS:

Paul Morris Science Solutions for Exercise - Paul Morris and Patricia Deo Solutions for Chapter: Where are We Now and Where Might We be Going?, Exercise 1: CONSIDER THESE QUESTIONS:

Questions from Paul Morris and Patricia Deo Solutions for Chapter: Where are We Now and Where Might We be Going?, Exercise 1: CONSIDER THESE QUESTIONS: with Hints & Solutions

Learn and Prepare for any exam you want !