A Little History

For about a century, the United States of America was the dominant industrial nation in the world.  There were several reasons for this, including an abundance of many natural resources, the ingenuity of American inventors, the entrepreneur-friendly capitalist system, the efficiency of mass production, and the skill of an acceptably educated work force.  Combined, these factors made "Made in USA" a world-recognized stamp of quality and value in manufactured goods.

In the decades following World War II, however, the rebuilt industries of Europe and eastern Asia gradually began to surpass their U.S. counterparts in manufacturing items of quality.  Whereas in 1950 "Made in Japan" was synonymous with "junk," only a couple of decades later it was becoming recognized as so superior that cost- and quality-conscious Americans were beginning to forsake the products of their own nation's industry to import those from the other side of the globe.

Why did this have to happen?  As already mentioned, one reason was that foreign industries had been largely rebuilt following W.W.II (often at U.S. expense), whereas most U.S. industries were still operating with less efficient plants a quarter century or more older.  Another factor was that American industrial leaders had become complacent.  Beyond tacking chrome and tailfins onto 1940's technology, they were disinclined to innovate or improve their products, until the siphoning off of consumer dollars by foreign competition had become so intense that they were forced to take notice.  Yet another reason is that unionized American industrial workers, having secured decent working conditions and benefits, had begun to price themselves out of the labor market with ever higher wage demands.  Japanese and German workers were as well trained as their American counterparts but cheaper to hire.

When the average American consumer discovered that he could buy products made elsewhere which were both better and cheaper, the ballgame was over.  Though the warning signs had been out for a decade or more, industry and unions alike had largely ignored them and were caught unawares.  Finding themselves at a disadvantage in both quality and cost, their only available response at the time was to mount desperate "Buy American!" campaigns.  Yet even these appeals to patriotism had a hollow ring, for American manufacturers had themselves been "outsourcing" from cheaper foreign suppliers for some time.

But there was another reason as well, that demand for American manufactured goods continued to decline outside North America.  Most American products still used the antiquated English system of measurement, while everyone else in the industrialized world (including the English) had switched to the much more convenient and universally accepted metric system.  So if you lived in Europe or Asia and bought an American product, you had either to take it back to the dealer for service (an expensive proposition), or to buy an expensive set of SAE tools and perform all your own maintenance.  Even for those few newly affluent Europeans and Asians who, in the 1960s and 1970s, could afford to buy and drive flashy American gas-guzzlers, the added expense and inconvenience of doing even routine maintenance on them was simply too much.  So why bother?  Charges of "dumping" and "government subsidies" notwithstanding, it's no mystery that the popularity of American manufactured goods in foreign markets declined, while American imports of German and Japanese products steadily grew.

 

 

Comparing Systems

What's so special about the metric system?  Isn't one system of measurement just as good as any other?

Technically, yes, as long as the units of measurement are appropriate to what is being measured.  Obviously, it would be impractical to use feet to measure something as tiny as the wavelengths of light, or as large as the orbit of the earth around the sun.  But in theory it doesn't matter if we measure, let's say, the dimensions of a house in meters, yards, feet, or cubits, because any of these units will yield a manageable figure that can be used in practical computations.  However, some measurement systems are much easier to use in practice.

To illustrate, let's consider a few problems which Americans must routinely solve in order to perform common basic conversions in their system of measurement:

(If you don't remember how to do compound math, the only way you'll solve that last problem will be to convert all the quantities to inches, subtract, and then reconvert the difference to yards and feet!)

Now let's consider comparable problems that the Japanese, Germans, Italians, French, and even the slow-to-change English typically handle:

As we can see, Americans must memorize and multiply or divide by a bewildering variety of conversion factors just to work within their own measurement system.  They must remember (or look up) that 12 inches = 1 foot, 3 feet = 1 yard, 1760 yards = 1 mile, 6 teaspoons = 1 fluid ounce, 16 fluid ounces = 1 pint, 2 pints = 1 quart, 4 quarts = 1 gallon, 7.48 gallons = 1 cubic foot, 31.5 gallons = 1 barrel, 16 ounces = 1 pound, and so on for such measurements as mils, els, rods, acres, drams, teaspoons, gills, bushels, slugs, and short and long tons.

Everyone else, meanwhile, need only shift a decimal point to convert from one unit to another, or add or subtract 1 to get the next larger or smaller size of something.  What could be easier?  What's more, all industrialized countries (except the U.S.) use the metric system, so beer exported from Munich to Manchester never has to be converted from barrels to hogsheads, lumber going from Bucharest to Budapest need never be converted from inches to barleycorns, and 6-millimeter bolts from Oslo will fit 6-millimeter nuts from Tokyo.  Everyone (but the U.S.) uses the same sizes of bottles, boxes, tanks, nuts, bolts, tools, etc.  So we are left with the following question:

Why do Americans insist upon burdening themselves with an antiquated, non-standard system of weights and measures so cumbersome and confusing that everyone else in the industrialized world has abandoned it?

Four possible answers spring to mind:

1. The metric system is foreign.

2. Tradition.

3. Laziness.

4. Irrational fear of change.

• The answer can't be "A," because the system Americans currently use—the "English" system, which itself is a haphazard collection of standards from other societies dating back to ancient Rome and Greece—is also foreign; the "American" measurement system isn't American at all, but is entirely borrowed from others.

• The answer can't be "B," for even before the founding of the United States, America has been in the forefront of creating new ideas and traditions rather than observing old ones.

• The answer can't be "C," because the metric system is far easier to use in practice; even the English have given up on the English system.

• That leaves us to ponder "D."

 

 

Attitudes

If we ask the average American why the metric system has not been more readily accepted, chances are we'll get an answer like, "It's too hard to convert all those meters and liters and kilograms to feet and quarts and pounds!"

But let's think about this for a moment.  Why would anyone want to convert from a simple system to a complicated one?  Working in a system of feet, pounds, and gallons, we feel no need to convert measurements to the systems of cubits, stones, and hogsheads favored by our ancestors.  Likewise, if we work exclusively in the metric system we would have no more reason to convert measurements to the antiquated English system than to do all our our math using Roman numerals.  Outside the business of restoring antiques, what would be the purpose of doing so, unless we happen to be perversely fond of performing compound math to compute columns of feet and inches, pounds and ounces, or cups and teaspoons?

As most Americans learned in school (but have perhaps forgotten), the metric system uses interrelated units conveniently based on the decimal number system.

• Units of length and distance are based on the meter, a span of just under 40 inches.

• Units of capacity are based on the liter, a volume slightly larger than a quart.  A liter is the measure of space occupied by a cube measuring one tenth of a meter (ten centimeters) on each side.

• Units of mass (weight) are based on the gram, of which there are about 28 in an ounce.  A gram equals the mass of a volume of water filling a cube exactly one hundredth of a meter (one centimeter) on each side; because a liter has a volume of 1,000 cubic centimeters, a the mass of a liter of water is 1,000 grams (or one kilogram).

• In the metric system temperature is based on the Celsius scale, which equates 100 degrees to the boiling temperature of water (at sea level), and 0 degrees to its freezing point.

• The standard measure of time in the metric system is the second, which is also common to the English system.

• Other metric units apply to force, energy, work, and torque, but for everyday purposes we needn't concern ourselves with these.

With each basic unit, the metric system employs standard prefixes to specify units which are exactly 100, 1,000, 1,000,000, 1,000,000,000 or more times larger (hecto-, kilo-, mega-, giga-) or smaller (centi-, milli-, micro-, nano-), to suit the purpose of measuring almost anything from a molecule to the solar system.

Although one can use either the metric system or the English system to measure most anything, tools and parts made using one system are usually incompatible with those made using the other.  But while metric nuts won't work with English bolts (or vice-versa), we should bear in mind that precise measurements and calculations are primarily the domain of the engineer and machinist, not the executive, office worker, truck driver, or homemaker.  So aside from upgrading our measuring devices and tools (already underway because industry needs it to be competitive), the main obstacle in changing over to the metric system is building our personal familiarity with it.  For estimating sizes and distances (as we most often do), try the following approximations to get the "feel" of the metric system:

Or if you need to estimate things the other way around (once you're familiar with the metric system but still find yourself dealing with antique hardware—or attitudes), try the following metric-to-English approximations:

Once one becomes accustomed to thinking in meters, liters, and kilograms, it is just as easy as thinking in yards, quarts, and pounds.  (Actually easier, since calculations within the metric system usually involve factors of 10—simply moving the decimal point left or right—rather than tediously multiplying or dividing by the crazy-quilt of conversion factors in the English system.)  If we need 12 liters of soft drinks for a family picnic, we don't convert 12 liters to quarts or fluid ounces first; we simply go to the store and buy six 2-liter bottles of fizzy stuff.  Likewise, if we need a couple of kilograms of potatoes, we don't convert 2 kilos to pounds and ounces; we simply pick up a small bag of spuds and use what we need.  And if we want to know if the weather will be agreeable, there's no need to convert Celsius in the forecast to Fahrenheit; we just think, "20°C = a little cool," "30°C = rather warm," or "25°C = perfect!"

 

 

Progress

While America has long been renowned for the ingenuity and foresight of innovators like Franklin, Whitney, Morse, Bell, Edison, Goodyear, Ford, Einstein, and others, the attitude of ordinary folks has been largely one of resistance to change.  Had the United States been founded and settled just a couple of centuries earlier, I suspect, 20th-century Americans would still be stubbornly clinging to measuring things in cubits and leagues and using the old Julian calendar, and maybe even doing mathematics with Roman numerals!  Despite their image as the innovators of the world, it seems that "progress" is nowadays a dirty word to the average American, who must be hauled bodily from the past into the present (let alone the future).

And so it is with the metric system. No one in political power has yet had the foresight and guts to advocate and work for replacement of the quaintly cumbersome English system by the more efficient metric system as America's official system of measurement, over the objections of a reactionary public.  Therefore various factions have undertaken to upgrade the system on their own, out of sheer practical and economic necessity.

The scientific community, whose primary functions are tied to accurate and standardized measurement and calculation, was the first to adopt the metric system on a worldwide scale over a century ago.  Some new technologies have since followed the lead of science.  American industrial innovators have, under pressure of global structuring and competition, undertaken the task of adopting the metric system to improve the exportability of their products.  American auto engines and drive trains are now being designed and built to metric specifications, with other systems and components to be updated in due course.  Major manufacturers and global distributors of soft drinks (such as Coca Cola and Pepsi) now design new packaging in metric units in order to standardize storage and distribution, and makers of vending machines will naturally need to conform.  New machinery and tools (used to produce, process, and maintain those other products) are also being metrified as a consequence.  And although they might still be regarded as "odd-ball" down at the local feed store or lumber yard, metric tools are showing up in hardware outlets, as home workshop types discover that their antique tools don't work well on modern appliances and equipment, whether domestic or imported.

America will get there eventually, even if it must be dragged.  Even the Bureau of Standards will be forced to update, making the metric system the standard rather than just an approved alternative.  And future generations of Americans will wonder how their ancestors ever managed to get along with that quaint but clumsy hodge-podge not too fondly remembered as "the English system."

=SAJ=