American Weights and Measures
The colonists who came from England, carrying with them to North America their language, religious beliefs, and culture, also brought their system of weights and measures. This system had developed in an organic, unregulated fashion for centuries, some of the units and their names dating from before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Examples included the rod (16½ feet), furlong (40 rods), and acre (160 square rods). By the time of the first settlements in the early seventeenth century, the system of length measures had become stable and well-defined for the purposes of commerce, with its units close to those used four hundred years later. The official English standard yard bar made in 1588, for example, is only 0.01 inch shorter than the yard of the twenty-first century. The statute mile of 5,280 feet was so defined in England in 1593 and seems to have been adop...