Happy 150th Birthday to the Metric System
It’s a good day to throw away our yardsticks and become part of a larger world.
I do not usually post on Tuesday, but it is an important anniversary!
On 20 May, 1875, delegates to the Metre Convention signed an agreement to accept a standard of measurement that would be used by everyone. Jonathan Simone writes in the Conversation:
A radical initiative for its time, the Metre Convention ultimately birthed a system of measurement that would transcend language, politics and tradition, and lay the foundation for a new global era of scientific and technological advancement.
The delegates established the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) to come up with the Systeme International d’Unites (SI) that lets everyone communicate on the same terms. So you don’t get events like Canada’s famous Gimli Glider incident, where pilots thought their plane was full of so many kilograms of fuel when in fact it was pounds, less than half as much as they needed.
We have also apparently had exactly 150 years of arguing over the metric system. I am writing this from the UK, which has the worst half-assed implication of the metric system anywhere. The road signs are in miles, but you buy gas in litres. Sometimes the temperatures are Fahrenheit, sometimes in Celsius. According to the UK Metric Association,
Much teaching of metric to schoolchildren is wasted, since they have little opportunity to practise their skills outside school. When children leave school, they have to adapt to the imperial system, which they have not been formally taught. Many soon forget what they learnt at school yet have an imperfect grasp of and no ability to calculate in imperial measures. This could have serious consequences for road safety.
The emphasis on conversions (from metric to imperial and vice versa) inhibits people from thinking easily and consistently in a single system. People who use metric at work constantly have to adjust to the imperial environment outside the workplace.
Standard derived measures, such as fuel consumption in miles per gallon or in litres per 100 kilometres, cannot easily be calculated when a mixture of units (litres and miles) is used.
The Association calls it “a very British mess.” We have our own Canadian mess, where everything is metric but people still measure their own weight in pounds, but at least the government policies are more consistent. Then there is the USA mess, where the country measures in Imperial but industry and engineering mostly is metric.
Canada has straddled the metric and USA systems, but this 150th anniversary might well be a good time to throw away our USA measuring tapes and yardsticks and try to think of our mass in kilograms instead of our weight in pounds.
I have no love of the metric system; I think Fahrenheit makes more sense, based around feeling really hot and really cold rather than some property of water. Inches, feet and even miles and acres are based around human dimensions and the distances we can walk or the area we can plough. But Metric is the standard used by most of the world, a world that I want to be part of. So happy 150th birthday, Metric System; I am going to get solidly behind you, all 72 kilos of me.
You're dead right that you need to metricate fully or not at all.
We did it in Australia in 1970, when I was 14, and it worked fine, with a little patience. Now it's clear that it was one of the best things we ever did.
Of course we'll probably always retain linguistic fossils: "inching along", "penny wise but pound foolish", etc. And I think my grandfather, who was a very capable amateur carpenter, died with his beloved three foot rule at his side, whereas I shall do the same with my beloved metre rule (though it does have inches on the "other" side).
More seriously, a single measurement system for the whole world is a wonderful thing that allows so much and saves so much waste and confusion.
For years I had a sticker stuck to my workshop wall that I had peeled off a piece of plywood. I felt it represented Canada's approach to our metric conversion perfectly. The sticker listed the dimensions of the plywood as 18mm x 4' x 8'. Several decades later we are still stuck in the same idiocy...