Unfortunately Britain made the appalling mistake of adopting the metre.millimetre when it metricated. Whereas all throughout the already metricated Common Market, centimetres were the units used for common measurements in the building and engineering industries.
So when British manufacturers started producing steel tapes with metric markings, they used metre.millimetre markings and anyone who has ever used the infernal things will tell you right away that it introduces and massive cause of errors. Finally, the British manufacturers realized what useless shit they were producing and moved to centimetrically marked steel tapes. I along with most people using them professionally literally threw away all their metre.millimetre marked tapes and replaced them with centimetrically marked ones!
If you don't work daily with steel tapes, you may wonder what the problem with the markings on them could be! If you worked with them - you'd know!
@Paulos_the_fog @DeltaWye
Interesting story
I took it always for granted that they were labeled in all three decades - thats is finest divisions in millimeters then centimeters, decimeters and full meters
The Stanley tape that happens to be sitting on my desk (and shouldn't be) is marked in centimetres and millimetres - there are no metre markings at all. I guess they expect the user to know that 100cm = 1 metre.
