License plates
 

The physical dimensions of license plates- the overall measurements and the size and placement of the holes- appears be uniformly standardized across all the states of Canada, Mexico, and the US.

The same is true across the various nations of Europe, and has been since long before the formation of the EU, albeit to an entirely different and incompatible standard.

How did this come to be?

A politician's brother owns a license plate manufacturing plant?

I'd be more inclined to believe it was the auto manufacturers who set the standard. It would be difficult and expensive to have to make multiple mounting points/systems for each car or truck.

I always figured it had something to do with an early car - like a Model T in the US - that came with a license plate holder and was made in sufficient numbers that the states used it as a template. Then everybody would have had to copy. Plausible, but wrong.
It seems that in 1957 all the car companies got with their governments and adopted standards, so there are 3 basic sizes that cover almost every country. I find this less plausible, but it looks like that's what happened.

The bigger question is why the hell doesn't anyone use the lower holes.

I've had a few front plate brackets that only used the lower holes and tabs to retain the top of the plate, maybe that's why they have lower holes?

http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/vukAAO...ho/s-l1600.jpg

Only time 2 hasn't been enough for me was with too many subwoofers, don't really do that any more...

A bit of googling shows this to be true. In 1956, the Automobile Manufacturers Association and the states of the US and Canada did seem to settle on a standard format, which Mexico presumably adopted later.

Still, there are weird de-facto standards all around us.

A roll of toilet paper or paper towels. The width and tube ID seem to be standardized such that supplies from any manufacturer will fit dispensers from any manufacturer.

Shower heads, they're all threaded 1/2 NPT, despite the absence of any apparent official declaration.

Same for garden hoses, except they're not even NPT (or anything even remotely interchangeable with anything else.) They're 1.0625 OD and 11.5 TPI, which is weird as hell, so why does EVERYONE make them that size?

Shower curtains. While there are some exceptions, a "standard" shower curtain is between 70x70 and 72x72, with twelve holes, and packs of shower curtain rings contain 12 rings. Again, no official standard, we just got there somehow.

Kitchen ranges (slide-in oven / stovetop combos). Unless you live in a Manhattan apartment or are shopping for something really high-end, they're all 30" wide and 26" deep with a deck height of 36". And that's important, because kitchen cabinets and countertops are made to the same spec.

Dryer vent hoses... The International Residential Code (and the various State building & fire codes) have quite a lot to say about them, but they leaves the selection of hose diameter entirely up to the manufacturer. So why are they all 4" diameter?

Bicycle chains. There are a few different widths to accommodate different cassette designs, but they ALL have the rollers spaced at 1/2". Now, in cycling, damn near everything somehow traces back to France, to the point where carbonfags like Hustler even use French words to describe bike shit that was invented in the US / UK / Germany / Italy, and yet France never used the imperial measurement system! At the time of the invention of the draisienne (laufmaschine), France was on système mesures usuelles, and they converted to metric long before chain-drive to the rear wheel became standard.



De-facto standards are weird.



In the course of performing research for this post, I became aware of an interesting unit of measure called the Muckenseckel. This is a term from the Swabia region of Germany, which refers to the length of a common housefly's penis. Well, technically the word references the diameter of the scrotum, but in modern use it's been colloquially revised to refer to the penis itself.


https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...9c7e46566b.png


Which actually makes a lot more sense than the King's thumb, as pretty much all peasants in 16th century Europe had easy access to houseflies for reference, whereas access to the King was rather tightly restricted.

I usually do:dealwithit:

It's NH/NHR thread, which is a moderately old national standard currently maintained in an ASME standard.

Props to you for knowing that, which I was just about to post.

But from an engineering and marketing standpoint, it makes sense. Which is why I suggested it was the manufacturers that created the standard. I've been there when designing or redesigning products.

Look at it this way. You've just come up with a great new material/method that is superior to those that are currently in use. Take a garden hose for instance. Now, in order to sell these hoses, they have to fit the current faucet taps on people's houses. You can make them swap out the taps (hardly likely), buy an adapter (likely only if the product is far, far superior), or simply make them fit what's already there. After a few decades of this, nobody is going to change things. Once things are established, it's difficult to make drastic changes unless the new way is so much better and/or cheaper to make changing worth the hassle.

And if you are a designer, you damn well better know about these standards, or you are going to get bitten in the ass.

Oh, I agree.

But it's one thing when someone submits a proposal to a standards body, and then they issue an RFC paper, and then there's a working group, and then a standard gets published.

De-facto standards fascinate me by virtue of their unguided nature. I mean, there were probably a number of different companies producing toilet paper in the early days, and probably more than one of them even had the idea to roll it up into a cylinder which could then be dispensed off of a rod. But at what point, and by what means, did we all start buying toilet paper that was exactly 4.5" wide, with a cardboard tube in the middle having an ID of 1"? Did the company which first produced that design patent it? If not, why not? And so on.