Why the U.S. doesn't use the metric system

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The proposal, conceived by a bunch of pointy-headed Parisian philosophes, sounded brilliant: a universal system of measurement, derived from decimal-based units and identified by a shared set of prefixes. It would end the era of merchants buying goods according to one unit, selling in another and pocketing the ill-gotten profit. It would simplify scientific calculations and enable the free exchange of ideas around the world. It was an enlightened system for an enlightened time. If only the French scientists could persuade other countries to adopt it.

But pirates have a way of ruining even the best-laid plans.

In 1793, botanist and aristocrat Joseph Dombey set sail from Paris with two standards for the new “metric system”: a rod that measured exactly a meter, and a copper cylinder called a “grave” that weighed precisely one kilogram. He was journeying all the way across the Atlantic to meet Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson — a fellow fan of base-ten systems who, Dombey hoped, would help persuade Congress to go metric.

Then a storm rolled in, knocking Dombey’s ship off course. The unlucky academic was washed into the Caribbean — and straight into the clutches of British pirates. Technically, they were “privateers” because they were tacitly sanctioned by His Majesty’s government so long as they only raided foreign ships. But it amounted to the same thing. The brigands took Dombey hostage and looted his equipment. The luckless scientist died in prison shortly after his capture; his belongings were auctioned off to the highest bidders.

France sent a second emissary to promote the metric system. But by the time the replacement arrived, America had a new secretary of state, Edmund Randolph, who apparently didn’t care much for measurement. As the rest of the world adopted the metric system, the United States continued to bumble around with unwieldy imperial units. Aaaarrrgh!

We bring you this story not just because it is International Talk Like a Pirate Day (avast!) and an excuse to spin a swashbuckling yarn, but because, more than two centuries later, Americans are still suffering its consequences. Had Dombey made it to the United States on schedule, he and Jefferson may have talked Congress into caring about how we measure distance and mass. This country could have gone metric right from the beginning, instead of being dragged into the system kicking and screaming. Just think of all the time we might have saved! I mean, those hours lost converting the gram measurements in Great British Bake-Off recipes alone.

A 1793 copper “grave” weighing exactly one kilogram. (National Institute of Standards and Technology)

Elizabeth Gentry, metric coordinator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, cautioned that this is not quite a case of “for the want of a kilogram, the kingdom was lost.”

She’d know better than anyone. Gentry’s job for the past 12 years has been to talk Americans into adopting the metric system — now known as Système International, or SI. SI is simpler and easier to use, she said, not to mention the system of choice for pretty much the rest of the world.

Gentry doesn’t just talk the talk: Her car speedometer displays kilometers per hour and the weather app on her cellphone gives the temperature in degrees Celsius.

“Practicing and thinking about it and shifting the way you think — it’s really pretty easy,” she said.

She and her colleagues have made a convincing case: Metric units are now more commonplace than you realize. American companies use meters and grams for most manufacturing and all international trade; we buy soda in liters, not gallons; high school chemistry students make calculations in metric every day.

“I would describe Dombey’s misfortune as a missed opportunity,” Gentry said.

See, in the days just after the Revolutionary War, this country had no standard system of measurement. We barely had a single currency. A bushel of oats purchased in New Jersey contained 32 pounds of grain; but a merchant could then take his wares north to Connecticut, where a bushel was just 28 pounds, and turn a tidy profit. It was madness.

Even George Washington thought so. The president devoted part of the first-ever State of the Union to arguing for a system of standard weights and measures, which he called “an object of great importance.” Jefferson was assigned to develop a standardized system, a task he took up with gusto, but Congress considered his proposals only in a “desultory way,” according to a 1973 history published by NIST.

Back in Paris, proponents of the new metric system saw their opportunity. Jefferson was a noted Francophile, and France had just helped America win the Revolutionary War. A shared system of measurement would promote trade between the two nations and serve as a slap in the face to the British, who were still fumbling about with feet and furlongs.

So they sent Dombey to Washington. He seemed like a good choice: smart, hard-working, a veteran of previous trans-Atlantic voyages.

“He was only missing one trait,” joked NIST research librarian Keith Martin. “Luck.”

In the previous decade, Dombey had the yield of one collecting trip stolen by the British and thousands of specimens from another expedition confiscated by Spain. He had escaped from a Spanish prison and fled home to France only to find his country in the throes of revolution and several of his aristocrat friends in line for the guillotine. Capture by pirates was perhaps par for the course.

“The Dombey event is probably a bit of a footnote to history,” acknowledged Martin. But, had he and Jefferson achieved what they set out to do, “it could have made a big difference.” Since everyone was using different systems anyway, they might have been more willing to convert to metric, Martin suggested. At any rate, it would have given Luddites 85 extra years to adjust to the new system.

In 1875, the U.S. signed the Treaty of the Meter, which set up the International Bureau for Weights and Measures and established metric as the system of international commerce. But it wasn’t until 1975 that Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act, which called for increased use of the metric system at home.

Gentry calls measurement “that invisible infrastructure that goes on around us every day.” Nearly every experience you have had since the moment you woke up this morning — the tick of your alarm clock, the weather forecast on TV, the cereal you poured into your bowl — was based on a measurement, probably one taken in metric units. Dombey’s dull meter rod and copper grave are a lot more important than they look.

And whatever became of those standards? After being sold, the meter and grave made their way through a series of French intermediaries to Randolph, who apparently failed to realize their significance. No one is certain what happened next, but a similar grave ended up in the hands of land surveyor Andrew Ellicott, who was working on the street plan for Washington, D.C. A century and a half later, Ellicott’s descendant A.E. Douglass found the copper cylinder in an old trunk and offered it to NIST for display.

It’s impossible to tell whether this is the same grave that was stolen by pirates two centuries ago. But only six of these objects were ever produced, so Martin thinks it’s likely.

Either way, the object now sits in the museum at the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, Md., finally surrounded by people who appreciate its worth.

Isaac Asimov wrote a very good essay on the topic, I can’t find it at the moment, but I did find this, also written by him.

Sorry. We need our 1/3 of a cup.

Pretty simple, because the other system is just dumb.

We also enjoy football, played with an oval ball, not round like everyone else, and the “World” Series in which the only teams invited are from one country. Call us crazy…

As a machinist in the USA I can tell you we deal with both imperial and metric every day. Some blueprints are dimensioned in inches, some are in metric, it just depends on what system the client chose to use. Many shops program parts in the CAD/CAM environment and operate the machines in either inch mode or metric only, but there are probably shops that use both interchangeably. If the shop programs and operates in INCH mode only and gets a metric print, the machinist takes a couple minutes before starting to program the part and converts the dimensions to inches. Some blueprints show both units for every provided dimension, which is nice.

Many parts are a mix of the two systems, like the pocket diameters and other features will be drawn to nominal inch sizes, but they may use metric threads, or vice versa. Some imperial components are commonly used globally, such as ACME threads.

I usually design with inch units in CAD but anything I draw can be entered as mm also and it converts. Any imported components are auto scaled.

I’m grateful I rarely have to reach for my SAE tools instead of my metric tools. Fractional measurements are for the birds.

That said, I find it more relatable that 100 degrees is perceived as really hot for most people, rather than the point at which water boils at sea level.

Similarly, if I’m driving 100, that means I’m going really fast, rather than just with the speed of highway traffic.

I’ll happily take a lot of the SI system, but not all.

I think mass should be measured in curic. I hope some day we all will.

Triggered

Metric is always better, no doubt.

The advantage of the metric system is easy conversion between units.

It also always to be more precise in my measurements.

I like to say I’m 175cm tall. Not 5’9”, which seems unprecise to say the least.

And the confusion between metric miles, nautical miles, etc, makes me a bit nauseaus

You’re 5 inches and 9 feet tall?!?

Sorry, couldn’t resist. :partying_face:

Haha! :smiley:

Actually about the only place in the US that the metric system is NOT used is for consumer products. Industry and Industrial products for the most part went metric in the early 1980’s. I was quite surprised when I bought the service manual for a Chevrolet station wagon in the early 1980’s that all dimensions were in fact metric, and we had stopped talking about engines in terms of cubic inches, and begun talking about them in.liters.

Now that everyone has conversion software, the USAian system can pass into the history of humorous measuring systems.

My dad, a college biology teacher, remarked once that at work he thought in metric, but he couldn’t convert between the two systems easily.

What would become of the idioms that use the imperial system?

  • give ’em an inch, they’ll take a mile
  • inch by inch
  • like a ton of bricks
  • the whole nine yards
  • go the extra mile
  • pound for pound
  • I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole
  • going a mile a minute
  • more bounce to the ounce

Although I admit, “Give them 2.54 centimeters, and they’ll take 1.609344 kilometers” does have a nice ring to it. :smiley:

Kilometers Davis

Conversion software doesn’t help when it fails to be used properly, even by rocket scientists. :stuck_out_tongue:

Well, I’m an EX Englishman. Left there in 1959.
I still count and measure in feet and inches.
Peck. Bushel.Chain etc easy.

You say 13ft 7 in I can step it out. or 11 inches 1 yard etc.

Any metric no of measure. To me. is just a mix of a lot of numbers.

Sorry. Ft In. easy.
Metric. Uggggh no thank’s. Too hard to comprehend.
I work(ed) in construction til I retired.
Chippies. concreters. Brickies etc.
All got the metric figures on plans. Converted to ft/in.
THEN started work. Till about a decade ago.
lot’s still do.

Points of information, X2.

Listen you dolts,its not a meter its a metre. Please use the right word. And keep your multi-meters for measuring, well, not metres.

1 650 763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.

And the unit of mass , e.g. the kilo, has just been re-defined using a Kibble mass-balance based on Planck’s constant. (Yet another Great British Invention)

Though other alternatives were also proposed.

Otherwise a great rant.

Meanwhile I continue to measure my weight in stones and pounds, am happier with base 12 or 14 than ten (decimalisation of our currency was not good), put gallons (proper Imperial ones, not the little USA ones) of fuel into my car, even though they are nowadays measured in litres (4.54=1 Gal), and measure consumption in MPG, not km/l, buy my produce and jam etc. in units of 454 grams (one pound), still buy milk in bottles of one pint, one quart, and half or one gallon. As well as buying building materials in tons, not tonnes (very slight difference), and firewood in cubic feet or just “a load of logs, trust me”.

Oh and drink my beer by the pint, and sip my whisky by the 35ml (thats 10 UK drams) shot, and measure my land, and allotment by the acre.

Allotment Plot Sizes

An allotment plot is normally 10 poles. 10 poles are 302.5 square yards. One pole is an area 5.5 yards’ x 5.5 yards. … Up until the 1908 Act allotment plots were normally 20 rods (or poles) and ranged from this one eighth of an acre to 4 acres in size (i.e. 640 rods/poles).

Other widely understood units are a London double decker bus (7.5 tons for an old Routemaster), A Nelsons’ Column, An Olympic swimming pool, maybe nowadays a Shard or a London Eye or a QE2 class carrier (these really are big, well at least one is, maybe we’ll even see the “Prince Charles” one day, possibly even with a full complement of F35Bs). etc.

Go to rural France, and you can still buy things in “livres” AKA a pound, and even discuss prices in Francs, or even Old Francs.

Some rather more rigid, totalitarian countries don’t seem to approve of this continuing freedom and would prefer things straightened out into neat little boxes (tightly regulated with a bureaucracy and favouritism to match), but fortunately, they don’t seem to quite have the whip hand, at the moment, nor any real control, for all their trying.

It’s all kicking off here and there, but better not mention that, against the rules.

BTW, the US officially converted to the metric system in 1889. But some of you have been a bit slow to catch up, including NASA.

Metric system is just as flawed as Imperial units. Come at me!!!

Well sort of. It would be nice if the “World Series” included more teams other than the US and Canada, but 30% of the players that make up MLB (Major League Baseball) are nationals from other countries.

The game we know today as US Football started in the 1870’s, modeled after Rugby more so than Soccer, and the rest of the world certainly plays Rugby. The game was originally called “Gridiron” played on College campuses. I believe the NFL (National Football League) was started in 1920.