For a moment I had to check which list this came from-I thought it
was the Al Stewart Mailing List, but couldn't remember the thread!
(Greg Rowe will know what I'm talking about.)
Laura G.
>Two notes: Roman Legionaires had regular legs -- a pace is two
steps
>(left foot to left foot) so each step was 0.8 yards long. The
>calibration procedure involved using a lot of soldiers and taking
the
>average pace as the official pace. In any measurement, the error
is
>reduced by a factor of the square root of the number of
inidividual
>measurements made -- 100 soldiers reduces the error to 10% of the
>error of using one soldier. And Rome had plenty of soldiers to
work
>into their average.
>
>HTH,
>Donald.
>
>> Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 00:33:06 +0000
>> From: Michael Hargreave Mawson <OC@46thFoot.com>
>[snips]
>> The Imperial Mile ought to be pretty close to a kilometre.
The word
>> "mile" comes from the Latin "mille passuum" meaning a thousand
paces.
>> According to the OED, however, the Imperial Roman Mile has been
>> calculated at 1618 yards, which must mean that Roman
Legionaries had
>> *very* long legs. I wonder how they were calibrated?
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