Links to information about SI units (the metric system)

A Dictionary of Units of Measurement Excellent dictionary of units, as well as a wealth of historical information.
You, in this country, are subjected to the British insularity in weights and measures; you use the foot, inch and yard. I am obliged to use that system, but must apologize to you for doing so, because it is so inconvenient, and I hope Americans will do everything in their power to introduce the French metrical system. ... I look upon our English system as a wickedly, brain-destroying system of bondage under which we suffer. The reason why we continue to use it, is the imaginary difficulty of making a change, and nothing else; but I do not think in America that any such difficulty should stand in the way of adopting so splendidly useful a reform.
--Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thomson), in a lecture delivered before the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, under the auspices of the Franklin Institute, 29 September, 1884, printed in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, November 1884, 118: 321-341.
Drugs have taught an entire generation of Americans the metric system.
--P.J. O'Rourke

Marge: Now, I know you haven't liked some of my past suggestions, like switching to the metric system --
Abe: The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
- The Simpsons episode "A Star is Burns"

200 mm ruler

$Date: 2002/05/22 21:03:15 $