Foot by Foot - Mile by Mile

“Just Thinking”

So, the boys were over last night, and we were watching the basketball game, the Warriors were already knocked out and the Giants had a day off, so we watched Denver play OKC. Denver was down 2 to 3 to OKC’s in the best of 7 series. It was a good physical game, Denver played well at home and won, forcing an elimination game 7 in Oklahoma City, winner goes to the Conference Championship against Minnesota and the looser goes home. 

The Denver home court had a 5280 in the middle of it and on the front of their home uniforms instead of their Nuggets logo. Of course, 5280 is the number of feet in a mile and Denver is the “Mile High” City, so its gimmicky, but cool and is really just a marketing scheme, that all teams these days take advantage of to sell more jerseys. 5280 feet above sea level, talk about a home field advantage, the air up there is mighty thin.

Not having a dog in the fight and getting to chop it up with the family, the question was posed, why is there 5280 feet in a mile, then, why is there 12 inches in a foot and why did most of the world change to the metric system while we use feet and inches. This long preamble is a lead into why I spent the evening researching why a mile is a mile.

The Romans used a unit of measurement call the pes (Latin for foot), which was divided into 12 parts, inches. The base 12 was common in ancient times because it was easily divisible by 2,3,4 and 6. An inch, for The Romans, was traditionally defined as the length of three barleycorns laid end to end, and 12 of these made up one foot. A different take that I found stated that Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Rome all used body-based measurements. The inch was roughly based on the width of a thumb. The foot was literally a foot. 

So, we now know why a foot is a foot, but why is there 5280 feet in a mile. It starts with the Roman mile: The word "mile" comes from the Latin mille passus, meaning "a thousand paces". One Roman pace was 5 feet, so a Roman mile = 1,000 paces = 5,000 feet. Enter medieval England, land, however, was often measured using furlongs, a unit based on the length that a furrow a team of oxen could plow without resting, 1 furlong = 660 feet, a statute mile was defined as 8 furlongs, because that was a common measurement in land division.

The big change in 1593, Queen Elizabeth I's government wanted to standardize the mile to match both old Roman usage and land measurements already in use at the time. So, they defined: 1 mile = 8 furlongs, 1 furlong = 660 feet the result: 8 × 660 = 5,280 feet. Bam, we have 5,280 feet in a mile because there are 8 furlongs in a mile × 660 feet per furlong = 5,280 feet—a compromise between Roman tradition and English land measures.

The Metric System was Developed during the French Revolution. It is based on Decimal (base-10) units, the meter, originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole and was legally adopted in France in 1795.

A Millimeter (mm) = 1/1,000 of a meter, a Centimeter (cm) = 1/100 of a meter, a Meter (m) the base unit and a Kilometer (km) = 1,000 meters.

Let me know what you think.

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