inches and feet

[cdn52]

who was the first person to say that will be called an inch and 12 of those will be called a foot

[Hippy]

I think that the identity of the person who first used the system is lost in antiquity, but the word "inch" comes to us via Old High German "unza" from the Latin "unica" meaning the twelfth part. We derive our word "ounce" from the same source.

The Foot as a unit of measurement comes from the average size of a foot (the flappy thing on the end of yer leg!) that in turn was one third of the yard, the distance between the tip of the fingers of the arm outstretched to the side and the nose pointed forward. Going earlier (Egypt and before) the Cubit was measure from the tips of the fingers to the elbow. These measures were common as there was no need for rulers, but the measurements were necessarily inaccurate.

Roman architect-engineer Vitruvius Pollio (1st century B.C.) has been quoted as declaring the "natural" measurement system of the parts of a man, four fingers to a palm, four palms to a foot, six palms to a cubit, four cubits to a height, four cubits to a pace, and twenty-four palms to a height. By the time of Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) measuring rods and rulers were in common use for small units (drawings etc.), medium units, (buildings and plots of land) and by trigonometry larger distances for maps, navigation and astronomy. Clearly, for this to work, there had to be an agreed universal distance measurement system, but this eluded society until the 18th century when Napoleon's newfangled "metre" (originally a subdivision of the earth's circumference) was defined as equal to the distance travelled by light in free space in 1/299,792,458 second. How they did that I cannot say!

A length divided into twelve divisions derives from Babylonia and Phoenicia, and the Foot was first officially set in Britain by the courtiers of King Henry I (1100-1135) of England, who set the thirty-six inch length from arm to nose and decreed that the standard "foot" should be one-third of that length.