Measuring Tools

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. In 1774 the Royal Society offered a reward of a hundred guineas for a method that would obtain an invariable standard, and Halton proposed a pendulum with a moving weight upon it, so that by count~ ing the beats when the weight was in one position and again when in another, and then measuring the distance between the two positions, a distance could be defined that could at any time be duplicated. The Society paid 30 guineas for the suggestion, and later the work was taken up by J. Whitehurst with the result that the distance between the positions of the weight when vibrating 42 and 84 times a minute was inches. The method was not further developed.