My drawings and patterns were purchased by the Whitworth Company, and I was installed with one draftsman in a separate office, and prepared to put the work in hand at once for a 12×24-inch engine for the Paris Exposition, where Ormerod, Grierson & Co. had secured the space, and the drawings for which I had completed. If I remember rightly, the patterns were finished also. While I was getting things in order, Mr. Widdowson came into my office, and in a very important manner said to me: “You must understand, sir, that we work here to the decimal system and all drawings must be conformed to it.” I received this order meekly, and we went to work to make our drawings all over, for the single purpose of changing their dimensions from binary to decimal divisions of the inch. There was of course quite a body of detail drawings, and to make these over, with the pains required to make these changes to an unaccustomed system, and make and mount the tracings, took us nearly three weeks. When finished I took the roll of tracings to Mr. Widdowson’s office. He was not in, and I left them for him. An hour or so later he came puffing and blowing into my office with the drawings. He was a heavy man, and climbing upstairs exhausted him. When he got his breath, he broke out: “We can’t do anything with these. Haven’t got a decimal gauge in the shop.” “You gave me express orders to make my drawings to the decimal system.” “Damn it, I meant in halves and quarters and all that, and _write_ them decimals.” So all that work and time were thrown away, and we had to make a new set of tracings from the drawings I had brought, in order to figure the dimensions in decimals. He told me afterwards that when Mr. Whitworth commenced the manufacture of cylindrical gauges he made them to the decimal divisions of the inch, imagining that was a better mode of division than that by continual bisection, and supposing that he had influence enough to effect the change. But nobody would buy his gauges. He had to call them in and make what people wanted. “And now,” said Mr. Widdowson, “there is not a decimal gauge in the world.” He knew, too, for up to that time they made them all. So Mr. Whitworth could make a mistake, and I found that this was not the worst one that he had made.