Way back in the "olden" days of measuring stuff, before silicon strain guages and the like, instruments were mechanical in nature. A transition steam pressure guage I have worked on in recent(~2002) years was a bourdon tube guage with an LVDT connected so that as the tube straightened, the LVDT followed that change and served as a transmitter. The transmitter was originally installed around ~1984 but was in use as late as 2005 when I left the company. Calibration was of a curious nature, the instrument was metric, coming from, I think, Sweden. Yet the calibration screws were imperial, of 40 TPI.
Much farther back, at a different industry, I worked with a great deal of "Leeds & Northrup" instrumentation. Supposedly, L&N provided calibration standards to many industries, NBS (NIST) included. Prior to that, I actually worked for L&N in a production facility. I was not involved in producing instruments but worked with those instruments on a daily basis. At the L&N facility and at U.S.Pipe, there were instruments that were based on vacuum tubes right along side of transistorized devices doing the same job. The vaccum tubes had date codes as early as 1946 and used what today are archaic and obsolete technology. CAT and PAT (current [4-20 mA] and position adjusting type) controllers that fed directly from round chart recorders that used a "balancing motor" driven from tube amplifiers from a thermocouple. Essentially "analog computers".
Now, having tooted my own horn far longer than I am generally inclined to, I come to the point of this entry. Both 32 TPI and 40 TPI were fairly common thread pitches on those types of instruments. 32 TPI, of course, moving the screw 1/32 inch per revolution and 40 TPI moving it 0.025 inch as stated above. The size of the screw could be as small as a Nr 4 machine screw or as large as a 1/2 inch bolt. The screw size was relavent only to the amount of pressure needed. The pitch was the salient point, moving the adjustment by thousandths (40 TPI) or by a minute fraction. (32 TPI) These two screw pitches have been very common for many years, predating the second world war. It is very old (now archaic) technology.
There are still many iterations of this type of technology. Such as the cross slide (and compound) lead screw of a lathe. 10 TPI 0.10 per) for my older Atlas built Craftsman, 20 TPI (0.050 per) on my Taiwan built Grizzly, 16 TPI (1/16 per) on a milling machine. Any number of threads that will provide the desired movement per revolution of the screw.
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