I often hear how Americans are resistant to switching to the metric system. It just seems too much trouble to relearn. It made me start wondering why we didn’t use it since the people that came from England and started our country must have already been using it.
Imagine my surprise to read recently that it was only implemented in 1965! Thus spake Wikipedia:
So questions…
Why aren’t we using the BIS? Did our forefathers decide to invent a new system to leave the British part out? A clean break?
And was there resistance to the metric switch by the Britons in ‘65. And if so, how were they able to convert (with relative ease) while we yanks are not?
I don’t understand. You are using a slightly bastardised version of the old British Imperial system. Pounds and ounces instead of Kilograms and grams, feet and inches instead of metres and centimetres and so on. True you do tend to sort of go metric when you get under an inch, so you see 1 foot 10.25 inches for example.
Yes there was a lot of resistance back in 65. Greengrocers had to be threatened with fines for selling potatoes by the pound instead of 454 grams. Milk and beer were exempted from the change so we still buy them by the pint, but petrol is 100% metric. Road distances and speed limits are still measured in miles too, although walking distances, as on footpaths, are shown in kilometres.
Engineering is all metric and we no longer have the plethora of threads that used to be the case.
There is always resistance to change. Canada converted to metric in 1970/71 mainly by establishing a legal framework and a Metric Commission to further it along. It wasn’t simple but the key approach was to educate children and allow that seed to grow.
The US still has pennies, paper money and a large enough population that screams bloody murder if told to wear seat belts - what makes you think any politician would want to deal with that?
You need to read up on measurement system history in general. National standardization of systems of measurement was a lot less rigid back when Europeans in the US hashed out what units to use and how to define them, and although the start of the metric system was (mostly) right after the French revolution, it didn’t really become an international thing until the meter convention in 1875. And before that everyone and their aunt had their own definition of an inch:
Part of the reason why the metric system was necessary was that none of the other systems in use before it were ever actually standardized. Even without the imperial-American distinction, there are survey miles, statute miles, and nautical miles; short and long tons; Troy and Avoidupois ounces and pounds; fluid and mass ounces; and all manner of other variations. It’s hardly surprising that the US and Britain used different units, because everyone used different units.
That’s really the issue in the US. Where’s the political gain for going metric? No one is actually dissatisfied with Imperial measurements and we’re such a huge market, we can make the rest of the world market to us in whatever units we like, so there’s no real external pressure. 2 liters of pop did manage to creep in, but mostly it’s just too much of a bother to change. To be honest, most people under 50 know small metric lengths decently enough to change. I don’t see us leaving miles behind anytime soon. Kilometres just feel weird to us in ways that meters don’t. Weights would be a more difficult slog, but doable. Temperature is a lost cause. I think that Americans would die before moving to Celsius. It’s probably the metric unit that I have the most difficulty with. If you tell me something weighs ten kilos or is 25 cm long or is 30 litres, I have a good idea what you’re talking about. If you tell me that it’s 25 Celsius, I couldn’t tell you if that’s hot, cold or something altogether different. I always have to do the conversion and it’s a painful conversion to do. I’ve looked at the conversion charts and I still just don’t get it. When I’m in a foreign country, the weather might as well be given to me in Etruscan for all I understand it. No idea why Celsius is such a bear, really it’s only about 60 numbers that I need to memorize their Fahrenheit equivalent, but it just won’t stick.
There are also issues with specific types of measurements. I don’t even know what board-feet would be in metric. And horsepower is way more understandable than watts to me. Hectares are a mystery to me completely. There are others I’m sure.
The ones I underlined are used only in the US or to be able to trade with the US. The viscosity units I’ve used were all metric, and that includes multiple sectors, multiple countries including the US: measurement conditions do change a lot, the units not really (they only change in that you pick the unit that’s going to give you the most “comfortable” numbers, as you can do in any metric-based measurement).
And I’m not sure what do you mean by NTP and STP. In my world those are conditions, not units, and were abandoned decades ago in favor of stating the exact temperature.
Try remembering this; it’s the only way I can keep track of Celsius in my head:
“30 degrees Celsius is hot
20 degrees Celsius is pleasing
10 degrees Celsius is not
0 degrees Celsius is freezing”
Was?? There still is! I was in a old-school greengrocers the other day - the sort of place which employs all its children to work in the shop and doesn’t take cards, a dying breed - and noticed they had prices written per pound (yes, they are breaking the law, but they are few and far between these days and I’m not sure Trading Standards could be bothered with them).
Everyone now under 50 was taught in metric, so it’s becoming less of an issue, but I still couldn’t tell you what I weigh in kilos, or how many km it is between my office and my house. I know my milk comes in cartons with the bizarre measurement of 585ml, and what miles-per-gallon my car achieves, but I couldn’t tell you how much a gallon costs at the petrol station, as I buy my fuel in litres.
No one except the people who actually use measurements. Most people don’t, and so to them it won’t matter one whit which system of units they’re not using. But the people who do use measurements almost universally prefer metric.
When I was a kid in elementary school here in the U.S. (early 70s), the metric system was really being pushed on us in school. We were told the metric system was the future. After a few years (by the late 70s?) talk of metric just sort of went away.
Funnily enough, it’s not as hard as you’d think. I can remember that, for years and years, weather reports were issued in both (“Today’s high will be 25º Centigrade, that’s a barmy 77º Farenheit, so don’t forget to pack a picnic!”). Then one, day, they just quietly dropped Farenheit, and we all just adjusted. Nowadays most of us old generation Xers still know that 70ºF is warm, 80º is hot and 90º is hot hot, but I really couldn’t remember what 40ºF is supposed to be like. Probably because at cold temps, Centigrade makes more sense. (OºC = ice).
I get the big jumps. It’s the little differences. Like I’m a fisherman and the difference between water temps of 39 and 40 is pretty huge due to water density, what the heck is that in Celsius? I guess 3.9 and 4.4? And 20 is around 68 if memory serves, but I know exactly what every degree of temperature between 66 and 75 feels like, I don’t have a clue what everything between 19 and 24 is. If someone says that they keep their house at 23 degrees, is that too hot? Too cold? It’s just a number to me until I look it up. And cooking and automotive temperatures are a complete loss to me. Cooking something at 190 doesn’t even register to me as to what temp that is. And I’m at a complete loss as to what coolant temperature should be in Celsius and what is the 10-15 degrees above that that you want your oil temp to be? The scales shift around, so I’m not sure is that like 5-7 degrees Celsius? I don’t typically like the idea of fiddling around with a calculator while I’m driving down the road. And don’t get me started on kilopascals. I couldn’t start to tell you how many kilopascals my tires need to be at or God forbid my oil pressure which will bounce due to acceleration. PSI is just intuitive to me.
As captured in another thread, the US fluid measure is based off the Winchester system and not the Imperial system.
This is the unit of measure Great Britain from 1824 when they moved to the Imperial standards really seem based around the pain of 1/8 being two shillings and sixpence. With 20 shillings per pound and 12 pence per shilling they moved to 20 Imperial fluid ounces in an imperial pint to simplify the tax system which had been 16 oz based before, and what the US uses (wine gallons).
The 1706 date I mentioned a gallon was defined as 8 merchant pounds of wine, and this ended up being 128oz at the time because they used a 6 inch tall and 7 inch diameter cylinder and used a historical approximation of Pi which was 22/7.
So a pound had 16 oz, and a pint had 16oz.
The avoirdupois pound for mass has been defined officially off the Kilogram for over 120 years, in the US this was from the Mendenhall Order of 1893 and this was changed a few years later when the UK joined in, and refined in the 1960’s But the US Customary units are based off the 1706 (Winchester system?), and not the 20 oz, 20 shillings model of the Imperial fluid system, which also kept the 16 oz pound.
Being base 16 which is in some ways nicer than base 10, and not having that 20oz fun while not official the US units are more like Celcius which is a derived unit with an exact conversion to the official units of Kelvin. I would be happier with one set of measures, but the reality is that there is less need to convert unlike most of the rest of the british empire who had to deal with the pain of the Imperial 20oz pint standard.
I was born after the changeover to metric in the UK but I measure people in Feet/Inches for height and Stones/Pounds for weight, everything else in metric.
Wrong. People prefer to use units of measurement that they’re already familiar with, and the only real advantage of SI units is that the conversion factors (10X, 1000X, etc.) are simpler if you don’t have access to a computer.
But all temperatures are just scales and notwithstanding a fisherman’s need for a finer scale, (new to me btw) hardly anyone needs a scale to be that accurate. Your house thermostat is going to operate in a fairly wide range, plus or minus whatever you set it at, and even then it won’t be all that accurate anyway.
I run my tyres at 2 bars when cold or 2.2 when hot, not rocket science and how accurate is a service station gauge anyway? (I use my own, but even that is not a scientific grade instrument) Frankly, my oil pressure is a mystery as I have no gauge - I expect the computer to let me know if there is a problem.
SI becomes problematic with computers (not SI’s falt) as an example,
I have 1 kilogram, I need to divide it between 10 people, so the computer tells me I should give each person 0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625 KG.
6 people returned their portion but the computer tells me that 6 * 0.1 does not equal 0.6.
With floating point, a decimal has an equivalent terminating bicimal if and only if the decimal, written as a proper fraction in lowest terms, has a denominator that is a power of two. If only the person who had invented our counting system had ignored the thumbs computers would be easier, and lots of math would be easier.
I work in the tech field so the base 16 math is easier, and has less loss of precision with computing defaults. Financial applications and other high precision needs actually have to use software math routines to avoid rounding errors on trivial operations due to this and that software runs much much slower (although IBM did add hardware decimal support to Power CPUs)
That said, representation errors like above are a problem, but a mix of standards is a bigger problem and the SI system is the only real option for that end goal.
I was in the 3rd grade. The US failed schoolchildren, by introducing the metric system as a series of endless conversion problems (before pocket calculators). We had pages and pages or very boring arithmetic to do every night-- how many centimeters is three inches? How many liters is four gallons? Gawd help us.
It would have been much better to teach children with questions like, “What would you use to measure the weight of a cat? grams or kilograms?” “How many meters long is your bedroom? guess, then measure it, and see how close you are.”
In other words, there was never any need for conversion problems. Just dive in and get children thinking in the new system. Kids like novelty, and I know we would have enjoyed the sort of questions I just quoted.