User:Imaginatorium/large sack

Working on large sack - a topic in the Cardarelli discussion

Total content in Cardarelli is a table, with headings including the following, in the relation 2:1:1

• Sack (large)
• Sack (sck)
• Hundredweight (cwt)

The creator of the article, User:Shevonsilva, has added a conversion to 10-microgram precision.

Using reason

Of course this is trying to say that the unit for coal was the cwt; coal was measured into sacks which normally held 1 cwt. Somewhere there may have been sacks larger than usual, which held 2 cwt. Intrinsically it is not likely that this was common, because in the era in which coal was delivered to homes, each sack was carried by a man, who can easily manage 1 cwt (50kg roughly), but would not normally be able to carry 2 cwt.

Using WPrules

Well, the expression "large sack" appears nowhere in the source. Cardarelli writes a parenthesised "large" after the 2 cwt sack, but then he writes a parenthesised "sck" after the 1 cwt sack. Could this mean it was a "sck sack"? Or, if "sck" is a fantasised international standard "symbol" for 'sack', perhaps "large" is a similar "symbol" for, um, a different sort of "sack"? This in itself is sufficient evidence of confusion, meaning that the source cannot be relied on here (any more than it can anywhere else).

Alternative versions of the truth

Table for "Coal measure" in The pupil's instructive companion: A sack is 1/12 of a chaldron, or 36 heaped Winchester bushels. A chaldron weighs 28.5 cwt in London, 53 cwt in Newcastle. In some parts of the country, 32 bushels make a chaldron. This of course makes a "sack" a measure of volume, not weight, but gives the following possible conversions to kg:

• 1 sack = 2.375 cwt = 266 lbs = 120.65557042 kg
• 1 sack = 4.41666 cwt = 494 2/3 lbs = 224.377025693303 kg

This "conversion website" gives

• 1 sack = 165.10762268 kg