When I am at work in the Regionaal Archief Nijmegen (Nijmegen Regional
Archives) I find things that are interesting from a metrological vieuw.
- Some time ago I was working with an archive that contains lots and lots of
technical drawings etc. There I found an ad for heaters from the 1950's. In
that time the kcal/h was mostly used for measuring the output of heaters.
However, one of the ads used something that was called in Dutch
'Warmte-eenheden', which means Thermal Units. What thermal units? One of their
heaters had an output of 72 000 Thermal units. These must have been either
kcal/h or British Thermal Units. It may have been either.
- In the fifties and sixties US Letter was fiercely competing with A4 paper as
both sizes are present in abundance in the archives. Then, from the late 60's
onwards A4 got the upperhand.
- The drawings are in metric units, but in some of those drawings, something
crops up in inches.
- In a letter from the 1930's I read about a bridge, 100 English feet long,
built somewhere near Nijmegen.
- Around Nijmegen some field names are a reminder of the old units of area that
were once used there. Field names are
now used to name new housing estates and streets.
- And of course, in all archives before 1820 we encounter our own old weights,
measures and money.
- The date notation of year-month-day was already used sometimes in the 19th
century and it has been a standard in the archival world long before ISO 8601
made its debut.
- In seventeenth century Dutch documents I sometimes encountered the ante
meridian/post meridian time notation.
And also old style/new style dates: the transition from the Julian to the
Gregorian calendar. That took a long time, as the Northern Netherlands, of
which Nijmegen was a part since 1591, was officially a Protestant nation, that
only very reluctantly let go of the old calendar.
