There you are taking my quote out of context. I’m showing the arguments that people have used in the past against metric measurements in the U.S. And yes, they’re silly arguments.
I know the measurements quite well. I’ve used them, and I’ve seen them used. In a few places, you see prices in 1/2 kilograms and people order stuff that way. They’ll say “Give me 3 1/2 half-kilos of that”. Surprisingly, half-kilos are just a bit more than a pound.
Certain measurements like the Pascal are so irrelevant that non-metric metric measurements are made up for it. My tires show both pounds per square inch and kilograms per square centimeter, not pascals.
The “English” measurements were made for a particular situation. You’re selling a horse, how tall is it? Well, I have my hand right here, I’ll see how many hands tall it is. How deep is it right here in the ocean. Wait a second. I’ll tie some knots in this rope and see. To make sure the knots are evenly space, I’ll space them from finger tip to finger tip. Thus we use fathoms and knots for ocean measurements. And, the English system evolved. Useful measures were kept, non-useful ones were dropped.
Unfortunately, there were a few issues with the English system:
[ul]
[li]Not universal: Only the British and its colonies used it. That made it hard to trade with other countries. As trade with other nations became important, agreeing how you’re measuring the amount you’re selling is sort of important. Heck, there’s not even an agreement between the United States and England about a lot of measurements.[/li][li]Not accurate: In the old days when you sold someone a few yards of cloth, it didn’t matter if you were a few inches short here or there. When you measure a grommet for a widget, you need accuracy. The need for accuracy made things a mess. Now, you had to know exactly how long an inch was and how long a yard was. This brings you to…[/li][li]One measurement had nothing to do with another: What do clothes and horses have in common? Exactly, so why should I care how many hands are in a yard? However, once you start defining each measure, you start having to relate one measure to another. So how many cubit inches are there in a quart? I don’t know, are you talking about dry quarts or liquid quarts. A quart is short for quarter, so there were four quarts to a basket and a bottle, but bottles of drinks were smaller than a basket for harvesting.[/li][/ul]
And, here the bureaucratically decreed metric system had its advantage! Universality? No problem Napoleon tried to conquer Europe, and thus spread the meter all over Europe. Europe colonized the world, and thus the whole world uses meters.
Accuracy? How can a bureaucratic decree be anything but accurate? And, the meter came just as the European world was industrializing and needed that accuracy. Thus, the meter was a meter from day one, but the British and the U.S couldn’t agree on an inch until 1959.
As for how one measurement related to another: It didn’t matter, you only had one prime measurement. If you were measuring length, you use a meter. Too short? Use a Kilometer. Too long? Use a centimeter or millimeter.
By the way, even the bureaucrats had to use some common sense. The meter is defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance between one pole to another with the meridian running through Paris. Why 1/10,000,000? and not simply 1/1,000,000? Because 1/10,000,000 was about the right length needed for a standard measurement for cloth – an important industry at that time. Why not make a gram a cubic meter of purified water? Why a cubic centimeter? Because a cubic centimeter was a better measurement for the scientific work that the revolutionary French government wanted to foster. (and it’s sort of hard to weigh a cubit meter of water).
And, metric isn’t quite as universal as its proponents propose. There are two separate metric scales: There is the cgs (centimeter-gram-second) based measurements and the mks (meter-kilogram-second) measurements. (Notice that neither of these systems used the base metric measurements. Why not meters, grams, seconds?)
As I stated in my post, the metric system would be a good thing for the U.S. to adopt – not because it is “superior” in any natural sense, but because it is used by everyone else in the entire world, and that in itself makes it better. In the end, commerce trump everything else.