One of the things I like best about history research is just the detective work of it. For example, 19th century, in one letter chopin wrote to his friend, he says something to the effect of, and I am deeply paraphrasing here: whew I sure am glad you're 40 miles away since you're so mad at me. Now chopin is in Warsaw when he's writing the letter, and his friend is in poturzyn. That's 320km or almost 200 miles. So I'm sitting there like ok either somebody is not where they're supposed to be, or chopin is measuring miles differently.
Turns out he's straight up measuring miles differently. He used the russian/prussian/austrian measure of a mile, which is about 7.5km as opposed to the 1.6km mile. 320km is about 42 of these miles. Really goes to show u can't assume anything works the same way you're used to.
Also, so funny to me that the 3 empires each had slightly different measures (7.58km vs 7.53 vs 7.47) that are nonetheless essentially the same unless u want to be really annoying about it, which is such a microcosm of the partitions overall lol
