How long would it take a “ping” (that might not be the correct terminology) to return to a Fathometer atop the Mariana Trench (36,000’)?
This Wikipedia article has a graph of the speed of sound vs. depth in the ocean. I think you’d have to perform some numerical integration to get an exact answer, but taking a rough average of 1520 m/s, it would take about 14.4 seconds to reach the sea floor and return.
I’m amused by the word “Fathometer”. Would that make my tape measure an “Inch-o-meter”? (Well, it is now!)
Oh! The ruler I bought in Paris can be a “Millimetermeter”…
There’s also mileometer (or is that not used in the U.S.?)
And barometer - although that’s probably cheating, it just comes from the same root as the unit of pressure.
Speed o meter
Though it’s not pronounced that way currently.
Speed is not a unit. There are hundreds of words xxx-meter where xxx is the thing being measured. The unusual thing is that fathom is a unit of depth.
Aside from mileometer (which may only be British), the only similar ones I can come up with are calorimeter, coulometer and ammeter.
I’m pretty sure mileometer is only British. The US term of course is odometer. But why isn’t it spelled mileometre?
I’m not sure if you’re joking, but this sense of meter (measuring instrument) has the same spelling in British English.
So…?
I was just pointing out it was another amusing use of the xxx-o-meter form.
What would imply I was saying speed was a unit of measure?
Wait is speedometer not used in UK or something?
What digs noted and found amusing was clearly the use of a unit of measurement with meter, so your post was a non sequitur.
If you want to insist that you actually understood that, and you were deliberately broadening the discussion to include all vaguely amusing words that end in meter, well I can’t refute that. But I’m not really sure what you find amusing about the word speedometer. Sphygmomanometer might be more likely to elicit a chuckle.
Maybe that it’s not a unit of measure and goes along lines of all the old hokey items that used to just add o meter to everything yet is used all the time like it’s normal.
Eager to argue for no apparent reason much?
Maybe.
And amusingly a Gas Holder (that’s Gas as in Natural Gas not Gas as in Gasoline) is called a Gasometer.
And a voltmeter measures electric potential, while (for some reason) a potentiometer doesn’t measure anything, being an input device rather than an output device.
I’m thinking a potentiometer is called that because it can be used to measure electrical potential, i.e., voltage, unlike a plain rheostat.
Interesting that you pointed this out. I grew up with “gasometer” (they were common in the U.K. when I was a kid), and I vaguely assumed that it must come from some other archaic sense of “meter”. But I just learned that it’s because the design derives from an actual measuring instrument invented by Lavoiser.
So it can potentially be used to measure potential, a potentiopotentiometer?
I think the idea is that you use a potentiometer as one component of a Wheatstone bridge or similar setup, and then use that entire circuit to measure voltage.