As you
probably know, the meter was a blunder. The French thought it was one
ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the pole, measured along a
meridian. Well, their math wasn't too
good. They got it wrong. So in 1960 the length of a meter was defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red radiation
of krypton 86 under specified conditions. As you can imagine, not everybody has
a piece of krypton 86 handy in case they want to check a meter or two, so, in
1983, the meter was officially re-defined as 1/299,792,458 of the distance light
travels in a vacuum in one second.
Now,
if you have a boat drawing 5 feet, and your chart says you are in water 2
meters deep, how do you know whether you're going to go aground or not? Where
are you going to get a vacuum from for a start?
Well, okay, say you have a Thermos flask and a flashlight to shine
inside it and a chronometer to measure one second exactly — how do you measure
1/299,792,458 of the distance the light travels? I mean, it travels so fast. So what use is a
chart marked in meters? What use, in
fact, is the meter? You'd be aground before you could find the Thermos.
Now
the fathom, on the other hand, is something you can get to grips with. The word
was derived from another word meaning two-arms'-width, or an embrace. That, in
turn, came from the Latin root for arms.
Not guns and things. Arms with hands on the ends. In fact the Latin
languages still make its derivation clear.
In Portuguese, for example, it's braca.
In Spanish it's braza, in Italian, braccio. English had to be different, of course. Our word fathom comes from the Old English
faethm, which meant the outstretched arms.
You'll
recall that the old lead-line used to find the depth of water was measured
between the outstretched arms. Now, it might occur to you that different sailors
had different-sized embraces, of course, so in the end, to keep things nice and
tidy the fathom was standardized at 6 feet. And nobody tried to pretend it was
any kind of portion of the distance between the poles, and nobody sat it down
next to a piece of krypton 86 or tried to measure it in a vacuum.
At
6 feet, the fathom is a subdivision of the cable, which is 100 fathoms or 600
feet. The cable, in turn is a
subdivision of the nautical mile, which for all practical purposes is 6,000
feet (or 10 cables). These are lovely,
natural, easily remembered measurements.
There is no Frenchified pretense about them. They're good old
Anglo-Saxon stock and they have served us well for many centuries. I can hardly believe we are doing away with
them in favor of such vague and inferior replacements.
We
must have lost our senses. If were President, I'd insist that people keep on
embracing the good old fathom. And it would be flogging and keel-hauling for
stubborn recidivists who tried to re-introduce the meretricious meter.
Today's Thought
O coz, coz, coz, my pretty
little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it
cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the bay of
Portugal.— Shakespeare, As You Like It
Tailpiece
"How
did you get that flat tire?""Ran over a Coke bottle."
"Jeez, didn't you see it?"
"Nah, the idiot had it in his coat pocket."
(Drop by every
Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)
