Going Metric? When/how did it start?

Factual Questions
81

They’re used in maths classes almost exclusive to English (American) units. The only time English units are used is when the lesson involves how to actually deal with English units.

No one in the United States is of necessity deprived of the metric system. It’s taught universally, including how to convert dimensions to volume. The thing is, most Americans choose to continue using English units, because it suits them in their day to day lives. Changing all of the road signs to km/h, the fuel pumps to liters, and the mileage ratings in mpg to kilometerage ratings in l/100km won’t do anything for anyone. I do recognize your point on the change wouldn’t be easy, though, but future generations won’t enjoy the pure metric world unless there were a way to convince today’s people that it’s needed. Unfortunately, there’s no way to convince them, because for most people, it’s just not needed.

Nifty anecdote: just last night my wife wanted to order some prints for some picture frames. Being from a nice little metric country, she brought me all of the desired dimensions in cm. It sucked having to gather up all of the picture frames myself and having to re-do all of the work in inches so that I could order the prints according to the way we do things. It really should convince me to switch to metric. But in the end, I got around it. No, I didn’t do the conversions because some of the sizes were coming out weird, like 2x3", and there is no such thing. In the end, there is a such thing but no one prints prints that small, apparently. Only 4x6" it seems.

As for calculating volume, I’d have to do the same thing in either English or metric units: use Google as a quick converter and calculator, either to convert 2000 in^3 to 8.65 gallons, or just to multiply 50.8x25.4x25.4 to get 32,774 liters.

82

I’m 40 now, so it would have been mid 70s to mid 80s, ish. I remember ‘mensuration’ being a significant chunk of the maths class, as well as being covered in ‘science’ (Phys/chem/bio all lumped as a group topic until the third year of secondary) and ‘humanities’ (geography/history likewise).

Honestly, I have more trouble now with grasping the way the school years work than I do working with either metric or imperial measures. I prefer to work with metric when there’s any chance I’ll have to divide or multiply quantities, or if I’m working on something that is to be communicated to others.

funny - I think it’s just fine the way it is now - and I think we’ve done fairly well. Ho hum.

83

weird choice of examples again, but I appreciate the points you were making.

Maybe the large size of America gives the whole thing inertia too - chances are, most people are far away from a border with a community that is metric - so for any individual to make the switch, they’re becoming aliens.

I do find (and I expect there to be some statistical bias in this) that I get more requests for hand-holding on quantity conversions (in my recipes) from Americans than I thing would occur if the tables were turned

  • most of the people I know will take an American recipe in cups and ounces, and will find the necessary resources to convert to their own system, all by themselves.
    -It doesn’t seem to work the other way though - I get a fair few people asking me “how many cups is 450 mls?” or “how many sticks of butter in 200g?” - it seems (and as I say, this might be just experience bias) that people get really inflexibly stuck in the US scheme of measurements - more so than people accustomed to other systems.
84

Odd, because here centimetres are very often used. Decimetres much less, and never decametres, hectometres or anything larger than the kilometre.

I think in France they use the centilitre; what I call 250 ml they would call 25 cl. And according to naita the decilitre is used in Norway. I guess it depends on the country.

85

Those were all very familiar quantities in Sweden and I expect Norway to be pretty much the same.

86

Centimetres are not completely redundant in the UK. You won’t find them on product labels very much, if at all, but they’re used in everyday human measuring a fair bit.

87

My experience contrasts with your assertion.

Which was my original point. I don’t know anyone who knows what a centimetre is! I have given measurements in centimetres at work and the look of bafflement I get in response is hilarious, even the directors and managers can’t work them out. It’s millimetres-metres-kilometers with no stops anywhere in between.

The same has applied for the last four of my workplaces, all technical and varied industries.

Even the spellchecker thinks they are alien.

88

That’s just bizarre. Do you have a ruler on your desk at all?

89

Huh. I wonder if the ones in my silverware drawer (I almost always use those instead of measuring spoons, just because it’s easier) are in metric.

I could convert teaspoons to tablespoons, and tablespoons to cups. Ounces- why would I want to do that? The recipes I’ve seen use teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups, not ounces.

However many the label tells you it will. Fish tanks are almost always labelled by volume.

Scales are not that common a thing to find in a US kitchen. I cook quite a bit, but I don’t have the equipment I’d need to cook by weight rather than by volume.

I avoid any recipe where that kind of precision would be necessary. And if the consistency isn’t right, I’ll throw in a little extra flour or liquid…

Could this have something to do with the fact that Americans don’t measure ingredients by weight? We measure butter in sticks or tablespoons (one stick has 8 tablespoons, and the paper wrapper usually marks off the tablespoon divisions for you). Would you immediately know how to figure it out if we translated one of our recipes literally and it called for so many milliliters of butter?

When was the transition to metric done in British cookbooks? I’ve never seen a metric cookbook (though some of them do have conversion formulae in the back). I have no experience in cooking with metric measurements. Do your metric cooks have some experience with cooking in English units? That might be part of it right there.

How is that messy? It sounds normal to me. A decent Pyrex measuring cup will have thirds and fourths of a cup marked off on it.

90

Maybe this would be the place to ask a small question I’ve wondered about since I first noticed it many years ago.

Automobile fuel consumption (I was about to say “mileage”) is measured non-metrically in miles per gallon, but metrically in liters per 100 kilometers. Is there some logical reason for the reversal of the terms? Why not kilometers per liter?

It just seems odd to use 100 km, rather than reduce the measurement to units in both terms.

91

Understood, yes, that’s part of the (my) problem

I do get a number of ‘why didn’t my cake come out like your pictures?’ enquiries, as a result of this.

Almost certainly.

No, in fact I’d never measure butter in ml - I’d use grammes - and if I was trying to work out a recipe that didn’t state units I was familiar with, yes, I’d go and find out how to convert the units myself, rather than asking the author of the recipe to convert them for me.

It started in the sixties, but the key difference is that we have pretty much always weighed solid or dry ingredients and measured liquid ones by volume, so the conversion from ounces and pounds to grammes is a simple formulaic one, rather than an ingredient-specific table of conversions. We’ve never really used cups.

Messy in the sense that it’s wordy to explain all those bits and pieces of units - in my video recipes, I only have two lines of subtitle text to play with, and on a web page, the sentence describing the conversions can make the line wrap - it’s only a minor niggle, but one that keeps coming up.

Also, because the conversions are inexact, and cups are quite a coarse scale, I need to take great care to make sure that I don’t round them all in different directions - if I round up the flour to the nearest quarter cup, and happen to round down the butter, the recipe might not work properly at all.

92

I’m with Mangetout here– that is bizarre. I’ve just checked three catalogues I happen to have to hand: Argos, Marshall Ward and Woolworth’s – all three provide dimensions for things like furniture etc in centimetres (though I notice the standard measurement for TV screens is still inches).

93

Commercial kitchens and bakeries in the USA almost exclusively use ingredient weights. For many, many applications at home, I also have switched to measuring lots of ingredients by weight, especially flour and other baking goods. I see this advice repeated in many of my kitchen books.

Every once in a while I run into a metric recipe, but I just make due. Unless it’s a baking recipe with a very specific chemistry, there’s not a whole lot that can go wrong by using “close enough” measurements.

Even though teaspoons and tablespoons and cups are discrete English units and have a metric definition, why aren’t they used in European metric recipes? It’s an exceptionally easy shorthand. Recipes that I get from Mexico (metric country) very easy refer to cucharitas, cucharadas, and tazas, while at the same time requiring 150 grams of butter, 200 ml of water, or whatnot. After all, give teaspoons is five teaspoons, whereas 25 ml means I have to put in two spoons of 10 ml, and then 1 spoon of 5 ml, and remember to break it down. Actually – I don’t know that. What are the common sizes in metric measuring spoon sets? In any case, I can imagine it’s the same as in English measurements. In my own example, I’d be lazy and reach for one tablespoon and two teaspoons, rather than use five teaspoons. For a baking recipe, I’d also expect this to be more precise due to measurement error, operator error, etc.

94

I’ve thought for a while that the U.S. will (fully) convert to metric when, and only when, something happens that causes the current system to be a tangible, practical problem. Right now, it’s not. I was born in 1970 and was in grade school at the height of the failed convert-to-metric effort. We were warned about all of the terrible things that would happen if we didn’t convert: communications breakdowns, being “left behind” the rest of the world, anarchy, cats and dogs living together, etc. And then, nothing happened. We use metric for some things and imperial for others, and, aside from the odd space probe crash, it works. And with the ubiquity of computers and calculators, converting from one system to the other has only gotten easier.

I don’t deny that the metric system makes more sense; if I was starting from scratch, I’d go metric. But I see no reason to push for change.

95

I don’t bake, for this reason. Also because Mr. Neville and I are fat enough without having cakes and cookies around in the house on a regular basis. If I want a cake for a special occasion, I go to the grocery store or bakery and buy one.

I was talking about home cooks, not commercial kitchens or bakeries.

Exactly. If you don’t bake, cups are generally good enough.

96

That’s just so people don’t know what they are buying and can’t complain when it doesn’t fit into the space they expected it to :slight_smile:

97

I moved to the US from Europe, where I’d grown up under the Metric system, some years ago. I found the “inchic” system unneccessarily confusing (although not as confusing as '60’s British coinage… shillings and pence, guineas and pounds. Now THAT was in need of simplification).

I eventually got used to the US system, but still perfer metric for the following reasons

–Anything has an appropriate “milli” or “Kilo” prefix, so you can keep the numbers to a reasonable level (generally under 10^^3 for everyday usage)
–I think in terms of mass (kg) rather than weight.
–As Rick says, sliding the decimal point back and forth rather than figuring fractions is easier. Mrs. Jinks has trouble with fractions: she’s not sure whether 3/4 is bigger than 3/8 (true story), but it’s easy to tell that 30ml’s smaller than 60. A 17mm sockets’s bigger than a 15mm one.

OK, you have to learn a new nomenclature. I’l agree that Greek prefixes are confusing and sound funny (femto? tera?). But… it’s a small price to pay to make things easier.

98

There’s a fight brewing in 2010 between the European Union and the US and I guess a lessor extent the UK. From 1/1/2010 the EU requires all packaging to be labeled metric only. Other measurements are not allowed at all. It was supposed to happen in 2000 but the US persuaded the EU to give them another ten years.

I’m very pro-metric but even I have to admit that while it’s reasonable to insist on metric or dual labeling, saying metric only could be a little strong but it will be interesting to see what happens. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is another ten year delay. Even so … if it hits the mainstream news it won’t exactly help the perception of the US in the world.

There’s lot’s of documents about this online although most are PDFs. Here’s an interesting article from 2003

99

>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?

>People often talk of the massive effort needed to convert to metric, but really, it’s negligible compared to the massive effort needed to keep the American system.

Chronos is right on with the answer immediately above. It is hard to imagine any real unit system that would be worse, would take more effort, would cost more money, would waste more on mistakes, would require more almost-duplication of products, and would be more frustrating and cumbersome, than using two or more unit systems. I deal with this every single day. I understand the unit conversions very well, and yet it’s amazing how frequently errors turn up, just because there are so many more steps to many calculations and they involve tracking down numbers - I mean, in computer jargon, literal strings from books or web sites or tables I’ve constructed over the years.

Yesterday’s misadventure - using an actuator whose top plate has threaded inserts. They look like 10-32, but a 10-32 won’t go into them. Since 10-32 and 8-32 look pretty similar, I try the 8, but it’s loose. Hmm, maybe they’re “metric”, not “English”. The metric screws are stored in another room, and in smaller metric sizes we don’t stock socket-head cap screws, so I have to use slotted pan head screws, which means I need more clearance for a screwdriver. So I make all that work, but the screws get much harder to turn after about 5 turns. Weird. Is it because they are the wrong pitch? From working on my Kubota tractor at home I think I remember that most metric screw diameters come in 2 or occasionally 3 pitches, but when I find a shop reference book here that lists them, it only says there’s a M4 size, no choice in pitch. So I add washers and torque 'em in there and figure it’s because the threaded inserts get deformed and stiff during assembly. This one little detail took an extra half hour, and required us to stock two sets of fasteners and have conversion books on the shelf. And stuff like this happens every day!

I think if it were any country other than the United States, with our penchant for unilateral thinking and our willingness to spend and the size of our industries, it would be impossible to maintain a serious complete set of units alongside the SI. But in our case, sadly, it isn’t impossible. It’s just really difficult and expensive.

100

It’s about 2/5 of an inch. :smiley: