Going Metric? When/how did it start?

Factual Questions
41

Some years back, somebody decided our wind chill factor* reports on the Weather Network channel had to be in the wonky and completely unintelligible to the average person measurement of “watts per square meter.” Thankfully, after a few months of this madness (and undoubtedly more than a few calls from people asking “what the hell is that?”), somebody had the good sense to let the weather forecasters use plain old degrees C for wind chill reports.

  • For those who don’t live in wintry latitudes, the wind chill factor is a factor of the actual temperature and the wind speed. It tells you how cold it feels outside. For example, the temperature may be -10C, but the wind chill can make it feel like -20C. As you can see, this is a handy thing to know when one is planning to go outside in winter.
42

What’s funny to me is the idea that “progress” to the metric system is still considered an improvement

Really, what benefits are there? True, the majority of the industrial world uses the metric system.

But is it so hard to do a quick conversion from one unit system to another if a trading partner requests it?

Like I said, in my work we sell both to customers who use the metric system and to those who use the US Customary units (see? I won’t call it the English system anymore :stuck_out_tongue: )

It’s hardly an issue. Those of us who communicate with customers know both systems and the conversions to and from each.

In my own case, my countrypeople still think probably 99% in the US Customary system.

Why should they change? I mean, what real, tangible benefits are there in thinking of air temperature in the same units as those on the other sides of the Atlantic and Pacific?

Like I’ve said, I’ve got no problem with the metric system. Particularly in measuring volume (compared with the US Customary units), it’s a lot more intuitive. But with a population firmly entrenched with the US Customary system, can anyone really argue that the massive effort in “converting” to metric would be worth the mostly ideological gains?

43

One spectacular example of problems caused by people getting confused by the transition was the Gimli Glider incident:

Essentially, everybody thought there was 22,300 kg of fuel on the plane when it fact it was only 22,300 pounds.

44

They are referred to here as Metric and Imperial respectively. There doesn’t seem to be any sense of “Ownership” to them.

Calling them French units certainly would not go down well with the majority, who seem to view France and anything French with a deep-seated suspicion. Tits.

45

Translated from a Norwegian encyclopedia.

Norway also switched to decimalized currency at this time.

I don’t know how fast the switch was, but it would have made a lot of sense to a small country with multiple trading partners, all with their own definitions of every single unit of messure. And the larger European countries at the time had just as much incentive, there being differences between regions within countries as well.

Switzerland was possibly extreme:

This from the wikipedia entry on Metrication which offers more on the topic.

46

In addition to the books mentioned above, the opening chapters of the excellent Measuring America by Andro Linklater deal with the reasons why Metric was thought to be a worthwhile idea, and the anarchic sets of systems it replaced…

47

Given the parlous state of the US economy, and the export-friendly state of the US exchange rate, it would be sensible to gear up to comprehending metric at least and catering to it. If you’re making stuff that’s standardised to quarts or yards, but the rest of the world (UK excepted - we’re weird) is asking for litres and metres, then your manufacturing facilities would benefit from a readjustment in thinking.

The “lack of benefits” argument makes me giggle when I see the tortuous conversions required for stuff like pressure or even volume, in imperial measurements. And stuff like 4’ 4"17/16ths?! Get with it, Granddad!

48

Absolutely.
We’ll never all speak the same language but for gods sake why make the simple things difficult.

Watchit, sonny! :stuck_out_tongue:

49

Why do people making the ‘what benefits?’ argument always use temperature as an example?

Although Celsius/centigrade is a part of the metric system, it isn’t really what people mean when they talk about ‘going metric’ - they’re generally referring to weights and measures: volume, length, weight.

Really, there can be no reasonable argument that either system is equally workable - Imperial/US English measures for volume, length and weight are inherently more awkward to work with, because they often express a single quantity in multiple units (each of which may use different multiples to convert to the next)

50

I am almost fully measuring unit ambidextrous. Length, pressure, temp, mass no problem. the only one I have a problem with is torque settings. I can visualize a foot pound. That is one pound on the end of a 1 foot long lever. I can not visualize a newton meter. I know what a meter is, but I have no clue what a newton is. Other than a cookie with figs in it.

ETA: For length in particular the metric systems kicks Imperial systems ass. Laying things out in metric is so easy. No fractions.

51

More or less the weight of a chocolat bar on earth.

52

Well, in at least one recent case that comes to mind, meter/foot conversion confusion in an engineering project led to a software bug that cost NASA (and thus ultimately US taxpayers) $125 million USD in 1999.

53

But to convince the average person to switch to metric units, they have to perceive a tangible benefit. Look at Canadians, even more so than the Brits. Their government switched on them almost every night. Yet the entire year I worked in southern Ontario, the only metric unit used consistently by 100% of the population was the kilometer. Most people use centigrade, but there is still a large number that continue to use Fahrenheit. Pounds, feet, ounces: everywhere.

I tried to order half a kilo of lunch meat, and the attendant looked at me like I was stupid. I tried to explain, you know, half of a kilogram. Still got the dumb stare. “How about a pound?” I asked, and she jumped right to it. And she was young. (Yes, I’m aware I could have asked for 500 grams, but she should have known that half of one thousand grams was 500 grams. Our exposure to English units gives us the advantage of being able to think in fractions, perhaps?)

What does “metrication” mean to the US anyway? That we force radio and TV stations to give weather reports only in centigrade? That we change all of highway signs? The we force medical professions to start recording our weights in kilograms and our heights in centimeters? Must we outlaw applicances with Fahrenheit scales (and make obsolete huge amounts of cookbooks and cookware)? This is why people always ask what the benfit is? What is the benefit of making all of these changes to the average person’s daily life?

I’m aware of the NASA disaster. Oh well, hundreds of things could have gone wrong. It’s not reason enough to disrupt the lives of 300 million innocent people. I’m aware of the commercial aspects, but business already is metric where it makes sense. Businesses don’t need to disrupt the lives of 300 million people just so that can use metric units. They don’t even need to have employees who “grew up metric,” as we’re all taught and exposed to the metric system every single day, despite weighing pounds and being feet tall.

54

But people have gotten used to the old volumes. When we buy a jug of milk, we expect it to be a certain amount. We know that our household goes through that amount of milk in a certain number of days. The effective unit here isn’t gallons or liters- it’s jugs. Change the size of the jug, and you throw off that calculation. That does affect daily life far more than changing the labelling on the jugs from gallons to liters (or metric gallons), and that’s the kind of thing that people don’t like. They will be inconvenienced by the change in something they buy all the time, and they will blame metrification.

Soda (or pop or Coke or whatever you call it where you are) is sold in both metric and English units here. If you buy a single-serving bottle of soda from a restaurant (if it’s the kind of restaurant that gives you soda in bottles or cans, rather than glasses or cups), vending machine, or store, it will be 12 ounces or 20 ounces. But if you go to the store to buy a large multi-serving bottle of soda, you will find 2-liter bottles.

I bet there wouldn’t be too much resistance to going to 600 mL from 20 ounces for the single-serving bottle, especially if the price stayed the same- it’s not a big change, and you get more. (Though somebody would probably whine about how terrible it is for children that now you get 0.3 more ounces of soda in a serving…) I bet there would be consumer resistance to going to 500 mL, since you get less and they probably wouldn’t reduce the price.

What advantage would there be in having single-serving sodas be 500 mL rather than 600 mL? I suppose it would make it easier if you wanted to combine them into a one-liter or two-liter bottle, but who actually does that? If people wanted to do that, there would be an outcry against the current system of the single-serving bottles being sized in ounces and the large multi-serving bottles being sized in liters. There isn’t, so presumably not many people are doing anything like that. Why bother to make it easy if nobody’s doing it?

The problem isn’t that last swallow. The problem is if the company is going to use metrification as an excuse for charging the same amount of money for less beer. Obviously, the consumers are not going to like it if a company does that.

If, instead of beer, you have something like soda or water that is sold in a vending machine, you have another problem (Maybe they sell beer in some vending machine somewhere in the US, but I’ve never seen one, not even in California with its liberal laws on sales of alcoholic beverages). Vending machine prices have to be rounded to the nearest 5 cents, since most vending machines don’t take pennies. If you give people slightly more but less than 5 cents worth more of the product, you either make less money or raise prices. And then there’s the whole issue of the vending machine hardware being optimized to the current size of the product.

I don’t have much sense for temperatures in centigrade, and I’m not nearly good enough at doing math in my head to convert them. I learned a poem:

30 is hot
20 is nice
10 is cold
0 is ice

and that’s about as far as I can get with centigrade.

55

One thing I have observed in Britain and haven’t seen anything to contradict it being so in America is that metric subunits are completely missing.
Linear measurements are mm, m. km. no cm. or dm.
Volume is ml. or l., no cl or dl.
Weight is gm. or kg. no hg. or dg.

Often the units become unwieldy. Where I work they will often quote a dimension as 4,300mm rather than 4.3M, for example.

Countries where metric measurements have been in place for decades make life easier for themselves by using the subdivisions as we would when using smaller and larger units of imperial weight and measure, the only difference being that there wasn’t a linear relationship between the subunits.

56

From google: 1 newton = 0.224808943 pounds force :wink:

57

Assuming the second one is 4.3 m, those two imply different levels of accuracy. 4300mm, is 4300mm + or - .5 mm. (You’d get the same indication of accuracy by writing 4.300 m, but then you might get someone clueless removing the trailing zeros.)

4.3 m would be 4.3 m + or - 5 cm. A completely different thing if you require millimeter accuracy.

ETA: Large numbers and millimeters are often used even if the accuracy doesn’t have to be quite that great because it’s convenient to have all the numbers in the same unit. If you need to do something where all the zeros are impractical, like adding lengths in your head, it’s easy enough to convert to meters and back.

58

But they specify the dimensions in mm when that accuracy is not a requirement while other nations have greater flexibility while still retaining the degree of accuracy required.

59

I don’t think I’m the first to opine that Britain has gone about metrication wisely - it has not been shoved down people’s throats, the old system is still allowed, but officially we have quietly shifted to metric. The areas that remain popularly imperial (distances, bodily measurements, one or two traditional foodstuffs) appear to be areas in which it doesn’t matter which system we use.

The only context I can think of in which it does cause confusion is automobile performance - in Britain, we use miles per (imperial) gallon for fuel consumption, which makes metric road tests that deal in litres per 100km less useful to us. But the traditional performance measurement of 0-60mph acceleration still pretty much stands, because the metric 0-100kph is close enough.

60

I hadn’t thought of this one. Someone asked me to explain torque to them last week and it would have been very difficult to using N-m, it’s much more intuitive the Imperial way. Horsepower too is somewhat intuitive, come to think of it, although putting things in units of 100-watt bulbs gets the point across well enough for most.