Slightly off-topic: I was in junior high school (grade 7 or 8) in the late 1960s when I first heard about the metric system. We were taught it in science class, and I remember thinking that my teachers were just making up this imaginary system, with its silly terms like millimeters and milliliters, as a teaching exercise.
Now I wish the U.S. were further along in its metrication. I think it’s silly (and somewhat embarrassing) that we’re the only major country in the world (unless you count Burma and Liberia as major) not to use the metric system.
If you are operating a lumber mill in North America, you will cut your product in sizes desired by the US market. And, in the interests of efficiency, you will not cut a separate set of products for the Canadian market. So, it’s 4’x8’ sheets of plywood for everyone, which entails framing on 16" centres.
That said, commercial construction is often a mess of both systems, with blueprints usually in metric.
Considering we buy far more than we sell, you might want to rethink that assessment.
With only a little more effort, we could have made the change here and we’d be better off. The metric system has useful analogues for many of our English measures. In Germany you can buy a pound of bread or meat, only it’s a “metric pound”–which is half a kilo. A metric ton–1000 kilos, is about 2200 pounds, which is close enough to an English ton that we can conceptualize it in the same way. A litre is about a quart, so someone should have come up with the idea of a “metric gallon” equal to four liters. And we’re already used to metric measures in some contexts, like the standard 750ml bottle of wine.
Having said that, our measures are vastly superior to metric in one important regard. A 12-ounce bottle of beer is better than a 333ml one. One does miss that last swallow terribly.
Depends on what you buy. A 355 ml can of beer is 12 oz, but a 341 ml bottle of beer is only 11.5 oz. (I’ve never seen a 333 ml can or bottle.) So if you want that last swallow, buy cans.
But isn’t this just dragging the nonsense out.
Should be 25cl., 50cl. and 1L. awkward fractions to continue the ‘old’ volumes are just illogical, captain.
We have the same crap here with milk and beer. Makes no sense whatever to me although I’m sure there are rational seeming arguments.
It’s like measuring something with a combined measure. Three hundred metres, 2 feet 6". :mad:
What I don’t understand is how the change to the metric system would be enforced. Will people be fined or thrown in jail for not labeling their products in metric? Will a TV station lose its license if the weatherman gives the temperature in deg. F?
I cannot find any cites, but having lived through the Canadian change in the 1970s, I do recall what we used to call the “metric police” seizing things like butcher’s scales that did not have metric measurements, locking gas pumps that weren’t converted to liters, and issuing fines all over the place. In one extreme example, a gas station owner was arrested for refusing to change his pumps from gallons to liters. I also recall such smaller incidents as the little old lady trying to buy a pound of something at the supermarket deli counter and being told that she “had to ask for it in grams, because it’s the law.” Little Old Lady said she had no idea what a pound was in grams, so just sell her whatever the equivalent was in grams. The supermarket butcher refused until Little Old Lady specified a number followed by the word “grams.” They went back and forth like this for a while, then Little Old Lady told the butcher to go fuck metric if he liked it so much (her words exactly; this is why I remember this story as vividly as I do) and left.
It was not an easy time. As I recall things, most Canadians didn’t see a reason to change, and nobody in government could give a good reason for it other than, “Most of the rest of the world uses it,” “Being based on ten, it’s so much easier,” and “You’ll know distances and temperatures on your next European vacation.” Although I don’t know how true it was, there was also a feeling in English Canada that metricization was being done as yet another concession to Quebec, which had been wanting it and was making noise about separation (these were the mid-70s, when the separatists made a lot of noise). All these things did not do much to make metric an attractive alternative to most Canadians, especially if they saw it being forced down their throats and threatened with fines if they didn’t use it. Sorry that there are no cites, but I don’t recall it being a very easy time for Canadians, and certainly not the cakewalk that many later commentators would suggest.
“Let there be one measure of wine throughout our whole realm; and one measure of ale; and one measure of corn, to wit, “the London quarter”; and one width of cloth (whether dyed, or russet, or “halberget”), to wit, two ells within the selvedges; of weights also let it be as of measures.”
This passage is from King John’s Magna Charta of 1215. Humanity has for some reason been trying for a long time to agree on a unified system of units, and I still spent several hours just this last week trying to straighten out several vendor’s spec sheets for moment of inertia in 4 different units. Usually no unit system is common to all the vendors, and often one vendor’s sheet will list several different units and do some of the conversions wrong. And don’t get me started on heat transfer coefficients…
The legal requirement is that labelling is provided in metric, and scales calibrated as such, but it is then also permissible to have additional labelling in other measurements. This, I believe, was one of the concessions the EU had to make to get Britain’s acceptance, rather than making anything other than metric verboten.
There was a standard joke 10 or 20 years ago back in our hometown (just south of the Canadian border) that yeah, Canada was “the Great White North”, cold weather and such – you could tell it even from the T.V. When it was nearly 70 in the U.S., the Canadian weathermen and announcers were saying it was barely above 20.
That’s interesting because I don’t remember anything like that in New Zealand. It all seemed fairly painless. Maybe I was just young and didn’t take much notice or maybe we just all followed along like sheep I remember little stickers to go on your car speedo if it didn’t have a km/h scale.
Some people will say that the US is already metric because long ago (1800’s I think) congress passed a law defining the inch as 25.4 mm.
The highway signs around Manchester, NH have km distances in brackets but I’ve only seen them for very short distances like “Next exit 1/2 mile (0.8 km)” which seems a bit pointless. I haven’t seen “XYZ 100 miles (163 km)” which might be more useful for a visitor.
The FCC radio frequency regulations seem to be metric. I saw a license hanging on the wall in a McDonalds relating to the wireless headsets they use. It specified the allowable range in meters.
I still kind of chuckle at it - when I was in High School, all my science classes pushed the metric system pretty hard - “METRIC is the international measurement system of science, and you must use it!”
Then I got to college and in my engineering classes the professors used English units the majority of the time. They explained it by saying that the majority of the manufacturing facilities and plants in the states use the English system.
Now that I actually work in industry - yeah, we use English units most of the time. Lab work is done in grams and Celsius, but everything at the production scale is pounds and Fahrenheit.
We sell a lot to Canada, but from my experience Canadian customers have no problem whatsoever getting a certificate of analysis in all english units. Occasionally we do get a Canadian customer that requests metric, but that’s no big deal.
The strangest thing I’ve had so far was when I did a project with a chemist from Japan about 6 months ago. Now, I tend myself to think mostly in English units (I am 6 feet tall, it is 85 F outside) but I can switch mentally to metric without too much effort. But the chemist I worked with had absolutely zero sense of English units - I’d sometimes slip up and tell him I ran a particular test at 77 F - he’d have absolutely no idea even roughly what this was till I would remember and say “Sorry, 25 C”
Meh, every time English Canadians have to do something they don’t like, they blame it on Quebec. I haven’t heard that the Quebec government wanted to switch to the metric system in the 70s; I suppose it’s possible – and they wouldn’t have been the only ones – but believe me, Trudeau really wasn’t the man to give “concessions” to anyone. Less appealing as it may be to the English Canadian mind, the federal government probably made the switch because they wanted to.
Interesting comments about you living through the change, though. I wasn’t alive yet, so I don’t know from personal experience how it happened.
I do hate to see them described as “English units”. If you go to weather.com, you can select an option to show temperature in “English units”, meaning Fahrenheit, despite the fact that England has converted to Celsius. As mentioned by others, England is in mid-transition, but temperature has gone metric. I left the UK 12 years ago, at which time the TV channels would report temperatures in Celsius, but verbally convert them to Fahrenheit so we would understand. Now, when I call home to my relatives and mention temperatures in Fahrenheit, I get asked what that is in Celsius, even by people who grew up with Fahrenheit.
I’m a 27 yr old Canadian, and though I say I’m 6 feet tall and 160 pounds, I have no frickin clue as to how hot 77 degrees F is. I also have no conception as to what a mile is. In fact, it pisses me off when I’m in the states. I will see a road sign that says “[some town] 40 mi” and I think, “oh good, I’ll be there in 20 mins” and end up being disappointed. I also tend to drive faster, as 70 MPH sounds really slow.
I think that’s fairly common in Canada. We use feet/inches and pounds for our height and weight, as well as for construction materials, but mostly international units for the rest, especially for younger people like us.
Not always. The long gun registry, for example, we blame on Ontario.
You’re probably right. I made my remark because I remember a number of commentators, ranging from respected op-eds columnists to “the drunk on the end barstool,” saying that. I do recall driving trips to Quebec in the early 1970s when the overpasses had metric height clearance measurements on them though, long before they had to. Still on those trips, the distance signs were in miles, so make of that what you will.
Yes, as I said, it wasn’t easy. Some folks enthusiastically embraced the change, some actively resisted it (see above for the guy arrested because he refused to change his gas pumps), and most were very cautious. What, exactly, did this change mean? Were the words “inch,” “mile,” “ounce,” and “acre” really to be outlawed? (Answer: No.) Would the government take away our Fahrenheit thermometers, our footlong rulers measured in inches, our Imperial kitchen measuring cups? (No.) Would we have to change popular idioms and expressions like “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile”? (No.) Yet these answers would not be apparent for some time after the change started, so there was a great sense of unease. It really was an uncertain time for many people, reassuring information wasn’t available, and any time you asked for answers to the above and other such questions, you were simply told, “It’s a great system, you’ll like it, it’s so much easier,” etc., etc., etc.
I’m not surprised the metric system never took off in Canada as it was supposed to; between our proximity to the non-metric US and exposure to its media, and the distrust many Canadians of my generation felt over the government forcing the change for what we saw as no good reason, meant that the system, while not doomed, was not going to be easy to implement. Legislating things like kilometers on highways and gasoline sales in liters and changing units of measurement used in schools to metric-only helped; but I’d imagine that now in 2008, we’re still a long way from where the Powers-that-Be of the 1970s hoped we’d be. Perhaps there’s a lesson there for any non-metric country that wants to switch: be forthright with good reasons for changing, be reassuring that citizens won’t have non-metric property seized or face sanctions if they use a non-metric word, and fercryingoutloud, don’t arrest people who don’t like it. That, more than anything else, I think, made many Canadians angry and resistant about the whole thing.
In Australia the change was mandatory, but AFAIK without penalty. The key thing was that Federal and all State governments, and all relevant industry bodies, were brought on board at the same time. The whole process took less than 12 years (in fact almost entirely done in the first 3 or 4 years from 1970) and there is hardly any resistance any more.
Pretty much the only examples of the old units still in use are inches in the computer/TV industry - screen and floppy disk sizes - and air pressure in tyres (as the metric equivalent chosen was very silly, a typical type pressure like 32 PSI is 2.24 kg/cm^2).
Here is as interesting page comparing the Australian and British attempts to convert to metric:
