On the amateur radio subreddit, someone posted this little bit of commentary from a 1967 issue of Electronics Illustrated:
The question is, is this argument rational or irrational? I’m just old enough to remember when we talked about frequencies in “kay-cees” and radio dials (yes, they had dials back then, too) were marked in “kc,” or more correctly, “kc/s.” My take on this is that referring frequencies in cycles per second is a lot more rational, at least a lot more self-explanatory, than referring to them as Hertz.
Most of my readers will blow this off as the ranting of an old ham, that is to say me. But, listen for a second. I teach a lot of newcomers. Part of that is teaching them the terminology, including the concept of frequency. It would be a lot easier if we could leave it as “cycles per second” instead of saying that we call one cycle per second a hertz, and then explain why we do so.
One fellow replied, “Obviously written by a luddite refusing to accept the SI system of units.” my reply to that is, “Mr. Cartwright doesn’t have a problem with the SI system at all, just the name of one of the units. And, if you ask me (I know you didn’t ask, but let’s just say that you did for the sake of this argument), he has a point. “Cycles per second” is a literal description of the unit and its meaning is more obvious than hertz, which has to be explained.”
So, while the horse is long out of the barn, and there’s no way to get it back, I do sometimes wish we hadn’t made the change from c/s to Hz.
Mr Celsius loves Hertz, Mr Fahrenheit loves c/s! Says a non-inchish guy (me)!
My lovely XYL just became a ham and she struggled with Hertz (nightmares), maybe c/s had been easier!
Exactly my point!
I guess I’m an old timer (operating over 60 years) and grew up in the Kilocycle/ Megacycle era. Cycles-per-second always made sense to me. Although it’s nice to give Heinrich the respect he’s do, there were probably easier/better ways to do it, that would make the physics a little easier to comprehend. No big deal I suppose, but good conversation. K8RQX
Twenty-something “derived units” in the SI system have been named. Some of them, I understand. It’s much easier to write 1 ohm than 1 kg⋅m²⋅s⁻³⋅A⁻². Was it really necessary to name the unit of frequency? Probably not, but if you go down that path, then we should refer to the unit of power as a joule per second or a volt⋅ampere instead of a watt.