WQPH Correction I Sent And Reply From Lowell Sun

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:02:29 -0400, A Joseph Ross <joe@attorneyross.com> said:

> How is it the official system of unis in the United States?  Last I 
> heard, Jimmy Carter started a program to convert the US to the metric 
> system, but Reagan killed it.

All U.S. customary units are defined in terms of the metric units.
(One inch, for example, is defined to be exactly 25.4 millimeters.)
This has been so for more than a century and a half.  (The survey
foot, the base unit used to survey the West, was defined to be
1200/3937 meter.)

The electrical units we talk about in broadcasting -- volts, amperes,
watts, hertz, ohms, and so on -- are all metric through and through.
(A volt, for example, is a joule per coulomb, or alternatively, a
newton meter per ampere second, or to express it in SI base units, a
kilogram meter meter per ampere second second second.)  Except for the
watt, none of them have any U.S. customary equivalent, since the
quantities they describe were not known in the eighteenth century.

-GAWollman