The US and the Metric System

. . .or, more correctly, the SI or Système international d'unités, the International System of Weights and Measures.

Officially, the US has been on the "metric system" for many years. However, this country has made only limited progress in converting to the international units.

We have in fact become used to describing the displacement of our car engines in liters rather than cubic inches, and I believe all the measurements on our car engines are metric, but I am not sure that metric screw threads are used.

But we put into those cars motor oil that comes in quarts and gasoline that is measured in gallons. (Note: The US gallon is not the same at the British Imperial gallon, nor are other units with the same names—the quart and so on—precisely equivalent between US and British Imperial systems.)

We buy wine and whiskey in 750 ml bottles, and soda in liter or 2-liter bottles; but soda also comes in six-packs of 12-ounce cans, and beer is sold in 12-ounce cans.

In cooking, all our recipes are given in teaspoons and tablespoons and cups. But it's probably in the building trades where there has been the greatest resistance to change. In spite of the fact that it's ridiculously hard to calculate the area of the floor of a room (for example, when supplying flooring) when you have to start with feet and inches and end up with square feet or square yards, American architects and carpenters still use feet and inches, and so do plumbers. And these guys are extremely unwilling to change. Not to mention that there's the more general resistance from various sorts of conservatives, who have even been known to assert that the metric system is a "communist conspiracy."

And America is the only country in the world to use the Fahrenheit temperature scale. When I was first in Europe, in 1970, and was talking to people, the weather or climate where I come from came up in conversation. When I was asked, "How cold is it?" I had to reply that I would need to do a bit of difficult mental math to answer that, because we used a different temperature scale and I'd need to convert to the units that they were acquainted with. That was met with incredulity.

So we measure our personal height in feet and inches; weigh our ever-swelling persons in pounds; and post highway speed limits in miles per hour. The last of these facts, incidentally, implies just one minor way--the units of the speedometer and the odometer--in which cars for sale in the US must be modified; another is climate controls, which for the US must read degrees Fahrenheit instead of Celsius.

There's mainly been change where international trade is involved. Since a car engine might be used in cars made and sold in multiple countries, it was important that car engines be built using an international standard of measurement. But it matters much less how our carpenters measure the wood they cut as they build our houses.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein