How many miles in a mile: a difficult question

How many miles are there in a mile? This issue of 250-300 years ago would pose a dead end not only for an experienced traveler, but also for a scientist. In what mile? And what is a kilometer?

The word "mile" comes from the Roman milia passum, that is, a thousand steps. The Romans meant the distance in a thousand double steps of a legionary. The need to measure the length, and not only of the road, but of individual objects, has always been with people. The distance was tied to the flight of the arrow, to the day's passage, and even to the tubes-that is, while you were going, you would smoke a certain number of pipes.

Especially popular were the names of measures of length associated with the name of parts of the body. This, for example, the elbow is 0.5 meters, the span is about 20 cm, foot is about 30 cm. The last is translated from English as "step, leg". Obviously, such a system is rather inconvenient. After all, legs, hands, and steps of all people of different lengths.

By the end of the nineteenth century, there were more than forty different miles in Europe for measuring distance on land. The answer to the question about how many kilometers in a mile, varied greatly even in neighboring countries.

The Roman mile, according to various sources, was 1483 or 1598 meters. In neighboring England and Scotland there were different miles. English was shorter, there were 1609 meters in it, in Scottish - 1808 m. Much longer was the German mile - 7,420 meters. The situation was similar in Russia. Here, as a land measure of length, the mile was rarely used, mainly it was used to solve metric problems. The Russian mile consisted of seven versts, and in it was 7,468 meters.

But all length records beat the miles of the Scandinavian countries. The Swedish mile had a length of 10,688 m, and the longest could claim the Norwegian - it was 11,298 m.

Naturally, this situation did not suit very many. And in 1875 in Paris, XVII countries signed a metric convention, to which later other states also joined. In use included meters, kilometers, kilograms. Now all economically developed countries adhere to the decimal metric system . Now answer the question: "How many kilometers are in 1 mile?" Much easier, despite the fact that the miles were out of use. The inverse problem is easily solved. Let's say we read that the objects shared 1 mile. How many kilometers will the traveler have to walk? The exact answer is. How many miles in a mile - now known for sure. The land mile is 1,608 km, and the sea mile is 1,853 km.

With the sea mile everything was initially a bit simpler. After all, in the sea you can not measure the distance by steps. Seamen to answer the question of how many kilometers in a mile, had to focus on astronomical calculations. The sea mile was conventionally equal to one minute of latitude, or 1853 meters, that is, if a ship swims along one meridian of one nautical mile, its location will change exactly for one minute of latitude.

True, there is a small catch. Our Earth is not just a ball, it's flattened from the poles. And it turns out that at the equator the distance separating one minute of latitude from the other is a little more. Therefore, there is another unit of distance measurement - the equatorial sea mile. It is 1855 meters.