In article ,
JoeSpareBedroom wrote:
"Steve Barker" wrote in message
m...
Having lived within 300 miles my whole life, I guess I'm am in fact not
familiar with other places water meters. Every place I've ever lived had
read out directly in gallons.


Same here. I don't understand why some nerd with a pocket protector would
bother to create an arbitrary unit of measurement, other than to justify his
job at the water authority.



Go back in history to that dim time when primitive computer systems
used tape storage, magnetic core memory and single registers of
limited capacity. Processing bills for say, a thousand residential
customers took hours rather than seconds as it would today.
Every reduction in the number of bits manipulated by a computer meant
that less expensive hardware could be used, and resulted in signifcant,
measurable reductions in expensive and limited processing time.

At the same time, the units used in engineering to calculate
resevoir and tank capacity, volume flow in pipes and tubes, etc.
all used cubic feet or other units more directly related to cubic
feet rather than gallons. So in fact, the historical measure in
a given area may well have been cubic feet from the beginning
of metered water supply in that area, rather than gallons. In such an
area, changing to gallons would be the arbitrary decision.


--
When the game is over, the pawn and the king are returned to the same box.

Larry Wasserman - Baltimore Maryland -