In American Colonial history, the Iron Act, short-titled the Importation, etc. Act 1750, (Statute 23 Geo. II c. 29) was one of the legislative measures introduced by the British Parliament, within its system of Trade and Navigation Acts. The Act sought to increase the importation of pig and bar iron from its American colonies and to prevent the building of iron-related production facilities within these colonies, particularly in North America where these raw materials were identified. The dual purpose of the act was to increase manufacturing capacity within Great Britain itself, and to limi...

Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used specifically to refer to French Revolutionary Time, used in France for a few years beginning in 1792 during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds, as opposed to the more familiar UTC Time standard, which divides the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. The main advantage of a decimal time system is that, since the base...

A horse length, or simply length, is a unit of measurement for the length of a horse from nose to tail, approximately 8 feet (2.4 m). == Use in horse racing == The length is commonly used in Thoroughbred horse racing, where it describes the distance between horses in a race. Horses may be described as winning by several lengths, as in the notable example of Secretariat, who won the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths (248 feet (76 m)). More often, winning distances are merely a fraction of a length, such as half a length. In British horse racing the distances between horses are calculated by converting...

A furlong is a measure of distance in imperial units and U.S. customary units equal to one eighth of a mile, equivalent to 660 feet, 220 yards, 40 rods, or 10 chains. Using the international definition of the inch as exactly 25.4 millimetres, one furlong is 201.168 metres. However, the United States does not uniformly use this conversion ratio. Older ratios are in use for surveying purposes in some states, leading to variations in the length of the furlong of two parts per million, or about 0.4 millimetres (​1⁄64 inch). This variation is too small to have practical consequences in most applications...