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There was also a metric unit of beauty, the "Helen" named after Helen of
Troy. One Helen was defined as the amount of beauty necessary to launch
ten thousand ships. Like the Henry and the Farad the Helen proved to be
much too large a unit for practical use so it is much more common to use
the  millihelen, enough beauty to launch ten ships, the microhelen,
enough to launch a dinghy and the nanohelen, enough to launch a dog
bowl. The Helen fell into disuse when it was discovered that alcohol
caused distortions and inconsistent results.


Gary LaPook

George Huxtable wrote:

>Alex asked- Why do we still use this terrible Babylonian hexadecimal system
>for measuring angles?
>
>I agree, that it's terrible.
>
>The French had a go at decimalising it at the time of the Revolution, but
>they bodged it.
>
>They proposed that a right-angle would be 100 grads, therefore 400 grads
>for a complete rotation. I think that was misguided. A complete turn brings
>you back to the starting point again, so that should have been the natural
>basis for the standard unit, the Turn, to be divided into 1000 milliTurns.
>
>There was also a Revolutionary proposal to decimalise time measurement in
>terms of the Day, but it failed, presumably because it would have made
>every clock and watch obsolete. If it had succeeded, then the mean Sun
>would make a Turn in 1 Day, and a milliTurn in a milliDay. And wouldn't
>navigational calculations have been a lot simpler?
>
>George.
>
>================================================================
>contact George Huxtable by email at george@huxtable.u-net.com, by phone at
>01865 820222 (from outside UK, +44 1865 820222), or by mail at 1 Sandy
>Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.
>================================================================
>
>
>

   

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