And I guess the other nordic types might be able to weigh in on as well.
Has sweden always been metric, or did the country go metric sometime around the seventies ?
Declan
Wikipedia FTW!
I am still curious about the purpose of the question though. There are metric countries and there are strict metric countries. The U.S. is ridiculed for not being a metric country but it is for many things especially some industries. Walk through any supermarket or hardware store and you will see metric units. We just never took it all the way but most people know and use some metric units. England is supposed to be a metric country but they still use other units like miles, pints, pounds, and stones commonly.
Why is Sweden of particular interest for this question and what metric units are of the most interest? I don’t know that much about Sweden and they still could use the heightendeautcharuler to measure how tall school kids are for all I know.
The ansewer to why Sweden and the metric system would be better served in the cafe. I’m currently reading the girl with the dragon tattoo and its a novel set in sweden, with swedish characters and written by a swede.
Yet I had always assumed that sweden was a metric country and that any swedes would use metric , even think metric. Yet there are several passages where Farenheit and miles are used, so far no metric at all, and this is set in the aughts.
So if Mr Stieg Larrson was not an older generation that was pre switch, then the next available ansewer was the book may have been edited for the US market.
declan
Just confirming that Sweden has been metric for a long time. Actually the inventor Anders Celsius was a swede.
Well, anecdotally, Canada must’ve switched over to metric in what? The 70’s? I was born in the mid-80’s, and I still use pounds and inches, have a thermostat that works with Fahrenheit. So, I’d say it’s hard to infer age based solely on that!
Assuming that you’re reading a translation, I would definitely suspect that the translator had converted the units for the American (or British) market.
The translation by Reg Keeland (which is the one normally available in America, I believe) seems to have been written by someone familiar with British, rather than American, usage. It includes words such as “gaol”.
It’s definitely a translation thing. I’m reading a kindle version and it’s metric all the way.
We switched over in the early seventies, I was in grade 4 when the first metric rulers came out, and then my dad got these little stickers for the speedometer on the car. So between 74 and 76ish.
Mainly I was asking because of Mr Larssons wiki page had his bio listed and birthdate in the fifties, which would be about right for someone in Canada or England to have been forced to switch over from SA to Metric, but thinking mainly in SA.
Declan
Born and bred Swede chiming in. Born in the fifties and bred since then.
Sweden has been one of the driving countries in the metrification of the civilized world. My father represented the Swedish government in the SI-conferenses from 1960 to the mid eighties.
As mentioned the Celsius scale was defined by a Swede, and AFAIK Sweden has never used Farenheit.
For some reason the lumber industry was the last bastion of archaic meusurement. When I was a kid lumber was measured and sold in inches, wood fasteners used inches and some arbitrary gauge system. This changed IIRC in the seventies.
Engines and machinery used metric, but if you were mucking about with older stuff you would find screws and nuts in inches. And with different threads. Bothersome.
Also some older plumbing used inches.
Which reminds me of the British prime minister who, when Britain finally decided to use metric, said:
We are now going metric, inch by inch.
Yay, my first post, I actually registered bacause I could finally contribute (been lurking off and on though).
That is because much of the lumber trade is done with non metric countries.
There is one non metric measurement that has been introduced lately, though, the pint (at least in the Stockholm area), which is because all Irish and British style pubs that have popped up during the last 20-25 years.
A lot of industrial measurements are done in non-SI scales though. We still measure oil by the barrel, land by the hectare and pressure by the bar.
That may have been done by the translator, what you need to ask is about “Swedes who’ve read Larsson” and see if those passages use Celsius and km in the original.
From English to Spanish, the only genre in which units are not translated is fantasy, among other things because your feet and pounds aren’t the same size as ours (we didn’t even have the same size of pounds all over what’s now Spain). Having the translator do the conversion makes it easier to read the translated book.
And welcome, Tassvarg.
Even though it is convenient if the translator makes all sorts of conversions it gives me a strange feeling when someone in the US is talking about kilometers instead of miles. It just doesn’t feel right (and is one reason why I prefer to read books written in English in that language).
But you’re used to it; heck, you’re conscious that people in Parts Elsewhere use other units. Now try that with my grandparents, or even with many of my mother’s cohorts.
The only non-metric measurement I came across was the Tum (Inch) for timber and when Kodak were unable to supply materials in metric sizes and substituted imperial sizes that were loads of fun to cut down in pitch darkness.
Related question (and I know it’s wikipdeiable, but I’d like some Swedes to describe what it was like)… was it Sweden that switched which side of the road they drove on back in the (I think) 60s? If so, what was that like?
Yes, late 60’s. I wasn’t around. I’m told a big blood bath was predicted, but in reality the accident rate went down instead. Probably due to most cars being left hand drive, even when Swedes drove on the left which made passing dangerous. So switching to the right actually increased visibility for the driver.
As an anecdote, the term “mil” (mile), is common in Sweden but refers to a distance of 10km (6.25 US/English miles). Fahrenheits are not used at all.