The dog and I took a walk along the river road and I wished I had along my son’s ranger beads. Ranger beads are a string of beads that soldiers use and they are like an abacus. There are two sections. The top has four beads and the bottom has nine. You simply count 100 paces and then slide a lower bead from one end to the other. After you have the nine lower beads to one end, after the next 100 paces you slide one of the upper beads. You have now walked 1000 paces. At that point, you start sliding the beads back. Using the beads you can easily keep track of up to 5,000 paces, or close to five miles.

It was the Roman army that came up with the concept of the mile. They called it “mille passus”, which translates as a thousand paces, or around 5,000 feet (five feet per pace with the definition of a “pace” being a step with one foot and then the other). Around 1500 A.D. the definition of the mile was changed to equal eight furlongs. A furlong is the length of a typical furrow in an acre and it was equal to 625 German feet. If you divide 625 into 5,000 paces you get eight, so a mile was equal to eight furlongs.

There was a problem. While the acre remained the same size, the length of the average English foot was smaller than that of the German’s so in 1593 the furlong was redefined by England to be 660 English feet. Now, doing the math, 660 feet per furlong multiplied by eight furlongs, equals 5,280 feet…the definition of the mile we use today.

The Roman soldiers couldn’t walk on water so the “nautical mile” was created. It was defined as the distance of 1/60 of one degree of longitude. The British calculated this to be 6,080 feet. Of course 1/60 of a degree of longitude changes as you move north and south of the equator, but at least it was based upon something other than the length of a person’s foot, which changes with each genetic heritage!

There came a time, in this case 1929, in which a worldwide conference was held and the nautical mile was redefined as equaling 1.852 kilometers. Because the value was based upon the metric system, the U.S. didn’t get in line with the rest of the world until 1954.

I wished I had the ranger beads on my walk because I decided to compare my pace to that of the average Roman soldier. I knew it wouldn’t be the same. The average height of a Roman soldier was 5’7” and I’m 6’. Also, I’m much older with the soldiers being as young as 16. Given my height, it would seem that my pace might be a bit longer than that of the soldiers and with my age, maybe shorter. So I decided to count my steps from point A to point B and then go to Google Earth and measure the distance.

It turns out that my pace was almost exactly that of the Roman soldiers. On my walk I ended up counting 1,200 paces, which according to Google Earth covered 1.12 miles, which equals a pace of 4.928 feet. That is, if I didn’t miscount my steps, which is why it would have been so much easier using the ranger beads!