Page:Miscellaneous Papers on Mechanical Subjects.djvu/74

66 revolutionise, but to abandon what has been manufactured and is now in use. But would not that be going too far? As long as the machines already made are in existence, the sizes of their parts cannot be abandoned; and these considerations have induced me to propose a scale which shall combine the greatest possible advantages with the least possible change.

It would be desirable that those establishments which may decide upon adopting the decimal scale should introduce rules having the inch divided into tenths and their subdivisions, which would soon become as familiar to the workman as the eighth scale he now uses.

The scale proposed for the wire-gauge commences with the smallest size and increases by thousandths of an inch up to half an inch. Contrary to the custom usually adopted in marking the wire-gauge, I have called the smallest size No. 1, being 1-1000th of an inch, No. 2 being 2-1000ths of an inch, and so on; increasing up to No. 20 by 1-1000th of an inch between each number; from No. 20 to 40 by 2-1000ths; from No. 40 to No. 100 by 5-1000ths of an inch. I propose therefore to suppress the use of the numbers of designation which have been hitherto employed for the various wire-gauges, and simply call the sizes by their expressive