A mile is 5280 feet because it is 80 chains (survey chains) long. The chain's length is a byproduct of English land tax laws which were by the acre.
The roman mile was 1000 paces, or 5000 feet, which made a bit more sense.
The roman mile was 1000 paces, or 5000 feet, which made a bit more sense.
Averages out better.
My hypothesis is this: Actually try to count every foot when you’re out. If you count only every second footfall, you can mentally go "a-one-a-two-a-three" and so on, but counting every foot, there are just too many of them. At least I get brain overload from it.
They're both shortcuts to count things with half as much counting.
It always got complicated with obstacles though. Especially since most of them didn't know how to do trigonometry yet. We usually just had them estimate which they got pretty good at after a few hours of counting paces.