In all our talk about how America must compete globally in the 21st-century, we’ve forgotten something enormously important—so enormous an omission it’s like forgetting to put on clothes when heading off to work. I’m talking about the fact that the United States is the only industrialized country not to use the metric system as the dominant system of measurement. Not to worry. We’re not absolutely alone. In clinging to our English system of measurement, we have company—Liberia and Myanmar.
Why a painter like me should care about this is beyond the scope of this post. Let’s just say I have my reasons—among them, that my tubes of paint come measured in milliliters, and it helps to know what that means in figuring out what they cost (duh). More important, I’ve learned about the enormity of the problem, as it plays out in the real world, from my American friend Bill. Living in Europe for many years before moving to Moscow about 15 years ago, Bill has always brokered heavy earth-moving equipment, shifting it around and about the world. Recently, he shipped a 600-metric-ton crane from the boonies of China to Casablanca. He’s told me, in detail, about the frustration he faces in dealing with conversions of our English measurements to metrics and actual instances where American business loses out, on a global scale, because we aren’t competitive with countries that, sanely, rely fully on the metric system.
On the home front, our failure to embrace metrication adds an extra hurdle for American students learning math and science. Instead of metric measurements bouncing naturally around in their heads from preschool onward, they encounter them only in high school, when they have to hunker down to learn them—as if they are a foreign language—before they can do any real science.
True, we abide by the standards of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM). We have no choice. If we didn’t, any and all attempts at international commerce would grind to a screeching halt. Yet all this means is that we agree to standardized equivalences, in kilograms and meters and Celsius, for our beloved teaspoons, cups, gallons, pounds, yards, miles, and Fahrenheit degrees. Meanwhile, for most of the rest of the world, our English measurements amount to nothing more than antiquated gobbledygook.
For a mix of dumb reasons—nostalgia, pure stupidity, lack of national resolve, and pigheaded American exceptionalism—we’ve never mustered the will to convert, as a nation, to the metric system. Sorry, but conservatives who hate big government are living in a fantasy world if they think individual states or market forces will somehow magically yield metrication. Without a national directive, backed by federal muscle and money, all this talk about making America globally competitive is no more than puffery.
Not that we never tried to convert. Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 “to coordinate and plan the increasing use of the metric system in the United States.” Yet America, land of the free and home of people who worship the phrase “our way of life,” has, ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, had to contend with a lot of citizens who consider the federal government a problem. With only “voluntary compliance” as the force for changing over to the metric system, the American response to the 1975 legislation “encouraging” metrication consisted of half-baked, scattershot attempts at conversion and a public simultaneously indifferent and resistant to it. I vividly remember my mother, a grammar school teacher, readying herself to teach the metric system to her third-graders; instead, in 1982, she got the directive to hold off. Apparently, it was turning out to be just plain too hard.
Not too hard for the Canadians, or the Irish, or the Australians, or even the English—all of them managing to convert to the metric system—a system that, when I come to think of it, is most likely doomed to never take root in America should Americans ever discover—horror of horrors—that it was invented by the French.
Yet Congress tried a second time, with the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act in 1988. We acknowledged the metric system to be the “preferred system of weights and measures for the United States and commerce.” Again, however, there was no federal muscle behind the act, either in money or mandate, and compliance was voluntary. What can I say? American exceptionalism prevailed.
Sure, Americans use conversion charts, and many American industries now produce machinery and other products manufactured to metric specifications. But this hardly counts as solving America’s problem in the global marketplace. As my friend Bill—who’s enormously frustrated in his business dealings by America’s failure to embrace metrication—explained to me, say you design a bearing in a critical part of a piece of machinery to have a diameter of 2.000 inches plus or minus 2/1000th of an inch. What is the allowed tolerance in terms of millimeters? To express it precisely would require changing the tolerance in the bearings themselves. The result is that when you buy tools for installation or removal of these American-made bearings anywhere outside the United States (other than in Liberia or Myanmar), you need to buy American tools as well. How’s that for American exceptionalism?
Get real, everyone. We need to convert before we can compete.
19 Responses to Convert, Then Compete
blendedlibrarian - February 8, 2011 at 4:18 pm
Convert to metric? You’ll have to pry loose my 9/16th box wrench out of my cold, dead hands.
coppocg - February 8, 2011 at 5:57 pm
We should have made the conversion in the early 1980s!! We were making good progress on that until President Reagan took office. He and his administration managed to kill it. Older folk may recall that some gas companies actually delivered gas in liters. Road signs were listed in both English and Metric systems. We were making progress.
But…the master communicator did not think it was a good idea. He did some good things for our country. But few people who idolize him realize the long term impact of that decision or of the fact that he actually raised taxes after it was obvious that he had overshot on the tax cut made at the beginning of his administration. Nevertheless, the budget deficit ballooned under his watch. Myth seems stronger than fact in the minds of many.
I would love to get rid of my 9/16th inch box wrench! … and the others in the English system as well.
jffoster - February 8, 2011 at 11:19 pm
Coppocg et al.,
As Professor Fendrich notes, H M Canadian Government and U K Governments both ordered their people to convert to metric and abandon the English system and they dutifully obeyed. Particularly the Canadians, since I believe they have a provision in the British North America Act or some other part of their Constitution that requires them to be nice.
We however do not, and Americans have generally ignored our government on this matter or told it to shove it. And yes, as you note, Highway signs in the late 70s and early 80s were given in kilometers as well as miles. And particularly galling was that on some of them, the kilometers were written big and miles small.
So some of us, er, some Americans got green paint and went out and greened out the kilometer parts on many of the highway signs.
Actually, I woud favor converting to a Base 12 system. And people who say they want the metric system are highly selective. They don’t really want to buy or sell a third of a dixaine eggs, or divide the day into ten hours, and hours into ten parts, &c. And they don’t really want to have only ten months in a year.
And if you converted in football from yards to meters, then the standard American football field would have to be longer, and then it wouldn’t fit inside the Sovereign State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which BTW also recently triumphed over Political Correctness by voting to keep its name.
goxewu - February 9, 2011 at 9:24 am
Great to see ol’ Prof. Foster’s wit at work again. (Do those ideas come while he’s driving around in his Yukon Denial [no typo], guzzling gallons [not liters] of gas?) First, he’s proud of Americans telling the Government to “shove it” in the matter of metrics, like some rebellious kids refusing to eat veggies and defiantly sticking to a diet of Twinkies. Second, he actually went out and defaced highway signs. (Vandalism, thy name is Prof. Foster.) Third, he proposes an absurd impossibility (a base-12 system of numbers) to try to trump a reasonble and, although difficult, feasible conversion to metric. Fourth, he raises the specter of collateral damage to American football. (Now there’s a real cause for concern.) And finally, he hints that converting to the metric system has something to do with “political correctness,” which Rhode Island allegedly defied by keeping its old name. (As Tina Turner never sang, “What’s Rhode Island got to do with it?”)
In the matter of the metric system vs. English measurements, anti-PC rhetoric and op-ed cleverness count for nil. What will be will be–and it ain’t gonna be the rest of the industrialized world saying, “Oh, wait, we’ve got to allow for American products and their oddball measurements, because we sure don’t want the Yanks to fall too far behind and let us have all the profits.”
dank48 - February 9, 2011 at 9:48 am
As anyone who’s grown up in the English system and has lived in Europe knows, the SI is easy to learn and get used to, although in two years I never got used to temperature Celsius, although I became pretty proficient at doing F = (C x 9/5) + 32 and C = 5/9 x (F – 32) in my head. But length, distance, area, volume, mass, and so forth are easy as moving a decimal point.
The only thing harder than the English system itself is conversion from one system to another (see above temperature translation). The only thing preventing us from recognizing the craziness is familiarity, and that is certainly not universal. My daughter’s math book in high school had problems in which an “acre” was “defined” as “about 45,000 square feet” by some poor simpleton who’d never heard that it’s actually not up for definition as one likes: 43,560 square feet, by God, every single time, since after all it’s 1/640 square mile.
And the units. What’s a section? Oh, well, that’s another term for square mile, specifically a square mile that’s actually square, not e.g. half a mile by two miles. Rods? No problem: 16.5 feet, or 5.5 yards. Furlong?
But the last I heard, the British were still using “stone” informally for persons’ weight, and the Germans were still using “Pfund” for bread, defined as half a kilo. Speaking of the British, how do you like “cwt,” which comes in long and short varieties? Of course a long hundredweight is 112 pounds. Never mind pounds avoirdupois and pounds troy, with 16 and 12 ounces respectively. Not that those are the same ounces, of course.
Personally, I think it’s all a matter of national defense. The idea is that any invader raised on the eminently sane and reasonable SI would be utterly confused by our crazy units and would be reduced to quivering jelly in a week. I’m not sold on the idea of Fortress America, to put it mildly, but it makes more sense than any other explanation I’ve heard.
Quick: how many teaspoons in a gallon?
marktropolis - February 9, 2011 at 10:20 am
jffoster – “America, F*%k yeah!” We do things our own way, and screw the rest of the world. We run this thing called global commerce, so the rest of the world is just going to have to deal.
American exceptionalism taken to new (different) heights.
billpigman - February 9, 2011 at 12:37 pm
A calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise one gram, which is one milliliter, of water by one degree. Express that in the English system , by tomorrow.
dank48 - February 9, 2011 at 2:56 pm
And speaking of confusion, what can be done about people who think “light-year” is a measure of time?
pocvecem - February 9, 2011 at 5:48 pm
I just got back from the grocery store and I couldn’t find a gallon container of Coke…
marktropolis - February 9, 2011 at 6:14 pm
pocvecem – that joke I got :)
metrico - February 9, 2011 at 11:39 pm
A very timely and well written article.
jffoster and other’s of his ilk with their measurement heads in the sand sound like drug addicts unable to face the fact that their addiction can lead to all kinds of serious problems and even death. What all of those guys have yet to learn is that America cannot function properly without metric units. So, why burden US school children with an extra and obsolete measurement mode when the rest of world is doing fine with one? Supporters of that anachronism are either stuck in the 50′, or blinded by an unholy patriotism that prevents them from seeing America’s steady economic decline?
olddad - February 10, 2011 at 6:35 am
It’s a pity that America did not convert to the metric system in the 1970s. Australia and New Zealand did, with no problems. America has been left way behind. Even Liberia is converting to the metric system!
goxewu - February 10, 2011 at 8:01 am
Mars lander, 1999:
http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-30/tech/9909_30_mars.metric_1_mars-orbiter-climate-orbiter-spacecraft-team?_s=PM:TECH
‘Nuff said.
jffoster - February 10, 2011 at 9:28 am
Maybe, Metrico, my head is in the clouds or at sea. In addition to the English system, I of course get medicines in ml, and mg. like Americans have in pharmacies for generations. Moreover, I frequently use nautical miles and knots, i.e. nautical miles per hour, in sailing and navigation and in flying. Do you? Can you? In fact, when I was a boy and teen, weather reports always gave wind velocity in knots, and even landlubbers and the grounded had some notion of how windy 12 knots was. And those of us who grew up on farms, or in agricultural areas, knew what an acre was, a furlong, a quarter section, and where I grew up, a _morgen_ (the amount of land a farmer with a mule or plow horse could plow in a morning — roughly 2/3 acre.)
Effectively, there are trade offs and advantages and disadvantages. The English system is a mixture of bases, including 12. And the common fractions, which ordinary people often use, are integers. 1/3 dozen = 4, 1/4 dozen = 3, and so on. But 1/3 dixaine = 3.333 and 1/4 = 2.5. And there are specialized uses = our Outside Temperature Guages are either in Centegrade or dual since what pilots care most about for immediate information is the liklihood of picking up ice, or in very cold weather for turbines, the liklihood of Jet A turning to jello, which can ruin your whole day. But I know quite a number of Americans who know both centigrade and Fahrenheit scales who prefer the evening news and weather in F because it makes finer distinctions and tells them how cold/hot it is.
Even if we allow our government to force us to use the metric system and abandon the English system, and I doubt we will, I don’t hear anybody demending a total conversion. We aren’t going to rebuild football fields. We aren’t going to quite using base 12 and base 60 for time, and we aren’t going to drop two months from the calendar and lengthen the rest. And before some of you claim that is silly and impossible, look at the ethnographic record and comparative calendric systems. The Maya Ha’ab, the Civil Year, had 18 periods of 20 days each with an epagomenal 5 day period. The Egyptian calendar had 12 months but also 36 decans and a 5 day epagomenal period.
Back a number of years ago during a space shot’s televising, NASA was giving altitudes and distances to the public in kilometers, km/hr.(1/24 of a day, not 1/10) and the like, and their switchboards lit up like Times Square. The general tenor of the calls from the American People was that “dammit, we’re paying for this so give us the information in miles and miles per hour.”.
NASA complied forthwith.
goxewu - February 10, 2011 at 1:37 pm
It’s amazing, the amount of relativist smoke Prof. Foster can blow in defense of an untenable (unless one WANTS the U.S. increasingly shut out of international industrial markets) position:
* “I frequently use nautical miles and knots, i.e. nautical miles per hour, in sailing and navigation and in flying. Do you? Can you?” Totally irrelevant. This isn’t a contest about who’s a more deserving Eagle Scout, Metrico or Prof. Foster, this is about industrial policy, or the lack thereof. And the fact that there are other measuring systems in use in the world doesn’t put a dent in the argument for metric.
* “I know quite a number of Americans who know both centigrade and Fahrenheit scales who prefer the evening news and weather in F because it makes finer distinctions and tells them how cold/hot it is.” Hello? All those people in all those other parts of the world don’t have an idea how cold or hot it is because they get their temperatures on the news in centrigrade? My god, they must all be suffering from sweat dehydration from putting on their overcoats and fur hats because the temperature is “only” 20 degrees centrigrade outside! If the foregoing isn’t obvious enough: When one is raised with a certain system of measurements, one gets used to it and can actually make practical judgements based on particular measurements in that system. Really, one can.
* Time and calendar measurements, and the history thereof, are irrelevant, too. Nobody is proposing changing clocks and calendars to base-10 systems. Why? Because EVERYBODY (oh, there are probably pockets of exception here and there–monasteries, etc.) uses 60-minute hours, 24-hour days, 12-month years, and there’s no problem of interface.
* “We aren’t going to rebuild football fields.” If the U.S. of A. is going to take an anti-metric stand, best to take it here. Rest assured, people will continue to watch the yards-system super Bowl on their HDTVs–none of which are made in the U.S., by the way.
* “NASA complied forthwith.” A concession to the increasingly dig-in-their-heels, non-competitive American populace. A symptom of the problem, actually.
Prof. Foster’s arguments are a perfect example of advocating cutting off one’s nose (“We use yards for football, and we use Farenheit on the evening news’s weather, so to hell with the metric system!”) to spite one’s face (the U.S.’s competitive position).
dank48 - February 10, 2011 at 1:51 pm
Another factor against conversion was the instruction to pronounce “kilometer” to rhyme with “pillow beater” not “kill ammeter.” When the powers that be (or the powers that think they be) decide they can tell us not only what to say but how to say it, there’s a problem.
Lots of people use the metric system all the time, and as pointed out above, often while scarcely realizing it. Scientists and others use the metric system in their daily work with no difficulty. The insanity begins with converting one system to the other.
The insanity continues by trying to extend the sensible, logical system farther than it can logically go. Does anyone really want 10 hours of a hundred minutes each, with 100 seconds per minute? Sure, a day would have 100,000 slightly smaller seconds rather than 86,400, but is it worth it?
goxewu - February 10, 2011 at 3:20 pm
* When did the “powers that be” in the U.S. try–as a direct part of an attempted conversion to the metric system–to tell people how to pronounce “kilometer” (or “kilometre”)? This alleged issue is a red herring, and a very tiny one, too.
* “Scientists and others use the metric system in their daily work with no difficulty. The insanity begins with converting one system to the other.” Yes, and those scientists are among the decreasing numbers (compared to other countries’ per capita production) of homegrown scientists that the U.S. produces. Among the probable (just think about it) causes of the dearth of U.S. students going into science is the bother of having been schooled K-12 and much of college in english measurements and then having to learn a new measuring system to do serious science. “Insanity” has been popularly described as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; in the case of metrics, it’s educating generation after generation in an internationally irrelevant English measurement system and expecting the U.S. to be more idunstrially competitive.
Nobody–as I said a couple of comments above– is trying to convert time measurements into an interlocking base-10 system. That’s because everybody of any significance in industrial trade already uses the agreed-upon 365/24/60/60 system, and there’s no problem of interface. Another red herring, maybe not even a herring, maybe a red minnow.
The U.S. is not going to convert to metrics without some sort of Federal program, i.e., Big Government mandating that we do it. Don’t want Big Government telling us what to do? OK, we’ll just waddle along, waiting for free-market forces to compel companies to convert, one at a time. And by the time that happens to any significant effect, we’ll be the world’s largest banana republic–that is, if reality TV shows count as bananas.
dank48 - February 10, 2011 at 5:09 pm
Goxewu, the pronunciation instructions came from my daughter’s sixth-grade math book. This was intended as a light, conceivably even somewhat humorous observation. Sorry I missed.
How big a group does it have to be to make “everybody of any significance” sufficiently large to constitute an argument? A year is approximately 365.24 days long on this particular planet, so digital years are obviously not practical. Any good history of the calendar relates how people have dealt with those “extra” days over the conveniently divisible 360.
Of course nobody is suggesting digital time–these days. But ten-month years, ten-day weeks, ten-hour days, hundred-minute hours, and hundred-second minutes have all been proposed and, sensibly enough, forgotten, time and again.
Let me be painfully clear: I think the U.S. should have adopted the metric system decades ago, and I don’t mean in the 1970s or ’80s. Imo the only rational reason to hang on to miles and bushels and pounds and so on is to confuse the bejesus out of foreign invaders, and I rather doubt that it would work. Unless “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” is a documentary.
But standardization would/will lead to disagreement. I’m old enough to remember when milliliters were called cubic centimeters.
metrico - February 14, 2011 at 8:28 pm
Re: jffoster
Well, be honest, medicine comes in spoons as well to cater for navel-gazing Americans not yet aware that there is a very user friendly and honest measurement mode outside their borders. US Pharmaceutical Co. would still use obscure minims and oboles had they been able to sell that anachronism abroad.
It seems you are very proud to have mastered all those medieval units and so you should be. It probably took you half a life time judging by American children’s retarded progress in maths. According to studies and international maths tests they are about a year behind their metric cousins. The knowledge of those weird and incoherent units shows why so many Americans wasted/waste so much precious time to learn and remember them. Metric farmers and their children have only 2 units to remember,
m^2 and hectares. For really big areas they switch to derived km^2.
By the way what really puzzles me is why did you get rid of the horses?
The reason US aviation switched from useless Fahrenheit to Celsius is that the rest of the world refused to use that nightmare.
Ah yes, dual measurements, a needless pain in the rear end that serves only one purpose, to make mistakes in needless conversions. Mind you it bothers aficionados of imperial/USC little that conversions ruin and even cost peoples lives in hospitals, surgeries and dispensaries. Using ml/mg with pounds and square inches for body surface would be even more cumbersome and doesn’t make sense.
Don’t worry about those fatal accidents, just insist on keeping your cumbersome and incoherent measurement hodgepodge and its inevitable mishaps. After all it is your human and democratic right even if costs other peoples lives? Sounds, familiar? Sure does, ever heard of the gun lobby?
I am always amazed to hear Americans defend their democratic right to choose the measurements they are stuck with and then force a 70% metric world to fly in medieval feet after 1945. Worse still they tried to force the UN to adopt that anomaly as well. Ironically it was the USSR that prevented that madness. America’s silly insistence shows that power can outstrip intelligence by far. Both Russia and later China spoiled America’s idiotic notion of forcing the world to go backward. Their simple answer, up yours. In our airspace you fly in metres and give all data in metric and of course Yanks have to. Luckily aviation is slowly, but surely reverting to metric again. Aircraft weight in most countries is in kg, ditto fuel load and burn off rate. Runways are in km and airport wind speeds are given in m/s and cloud cover in metres.
But you are absolutely right, Fahrenheit degrees are less coarse then deg. Celsius. Fahrenheit knew that when he fashioned his weird thermometer that people react to the smallest temperature changes. You can hear Celsius users all over the world complaining bitterly that they cannot feel it when the temperature falls from -5 to -4.8 C or any other combination thereof. Take it from me, I have heard Americans say that it’s now one degree F colder than an hour ago. Isn’t the human body, or in this case the mind, marvellous to react to such minute differences?
Yes, NASA, how dare they go with the times! Hey man relax, the rocket putting the first human beings on the moon was designed and manufactured in metric by non other than Werner von Brown,a metric Kraut. Its trajectory was in km, miles exist only for strugglers. All of the work today is based on that beginning and dumbed down for metric challenged Americans.
The tragedy is, if your economic decline keeps on going at the pace it does, metric China will soon take over and that is a pity indeed. America has done a lot of good in this world. Alas, that is one reason why super powers come and go. Most Americans seem to do their best to hasten that process. If you do not believe me, look at your external trade balances over the last 40 years.
You summed it up rather nicely: The general tenor of the calls from the American People was, “damn it, we’re paying for this so give us the information in miles and miles per hour.”
Well they are getting it and keep on PAYING an inordinate price for it. Amen