who wrote in 1857:

... instead of our engineers and machinists thinking in eighths, sixteenths and thirty-seconds of an inch, it is desirable that they should think and speak in tenths, hundredths, and thousandths ...

Whitworth's main point was to advocate decimalization in place of fractions based on successive halving; but in mentioning thousandths, he was also broaching the idea of a finer division than had been used previously. Until then, workers such as millwrights,

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