(no subject)

[webofevil]

The church in Stensele built in 1886 is Sweden’s largest wooden church. The church is called the Cathedral of Lapland, and has place for 2000 persons, and that is a lot when thinking that the place where the church is located only had 167 people in year 1900. There are a few different stories about why the church is as big, but most likely it was a mistake. The explanations of the mistake is that the drawing was made in the metric system with measures in centimetre (cm) but the constructions workers didn't knew that and thought the size was measured in inch instead. This mean that everything became 2,54 times larger than it was supposed to be. (link)

I only flag this up because, curiously, the exact same allegation was made about my old school theatre, with the added embellishment that the two architects (who won an award for it) are said to have walked in when it was finished and yelped that it was far bigger than they had intended.

Are there any other buildings said to have been built to entirely the wrong spec due to imperial/metric-related hilarity?

Comments

[strictlytrue.livejournal.com]

I had a hunt around on the net, and found a transcript of a discussion from Stensele town council about thie very church, upon its construction in 1886:

Mayor Gunnarsson: This church is enormous! Ridiculous! It is meant to seat 167 people, not 2000. Explain yourself.
Bjorn Olafson: I don't understand it - we followed your measurements exactly - look, it says here on the napkin...
Mayor Gunnarsson: Fuck the napkin!

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the notorious incident when the priest failed to emerge from the vestry pod for the entire Sunday service.

[offensive-mango.livejournal.com]

The Hubble Telescope, of course. Though that's not exactly a building.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

Really? I never knew it was the wrong size. Was it originally supposed to be a microscope?

[offensive-mango.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm thinking of the Mars Polar Lander, but later in that article it mentions that the Hubble mirror's curvature was ground wrongly. I think that was also to do with metric/imperial translation problems, but I can't find any proof in ten seconds using Google. Hmph.

[webofevil.livejournal.com]

"More recently Nasa has had the embarrassment of discovering its Hubble telescope is ''short-sighted''.

After its launch in April 1990, astronomers found Hubble's 2.4-metre mirror had been ground to the wrong curvature.

The space agency had to mount a very costly mission in 1993 to install a new set of optics to correct the problem. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/686674.stm)

They don't specify whether imperial/metric was the problem, though, the swine.