why is the US not Metric

[soldar]

Metric joke remembered from my childhood.

- Johnny, at what temperature does water boil?
- 90 degrees, Miss.
- No Johnny, water boils at 100 degrees.
- Oh, yes, now I remember what boils at 90 degrees is the right angle.

[bsfeechannel]

Well in Avoirdupois its 437.5, in Apothecary its 480 and the other
one is... What other one?

There are 450 grains in an English Tower Ounce.

[bsfeechannel]

AvE likes to play a joke on degrees celsius by calling them degrees "science", as if science had a bad effect over machinists. He likes to pronounce métrique, instead of metric, as if anything metric was foreign. Granted, it is a joke, and I laugh at it, but this is far from the truth. 

He always says "degrees Science!" with gusto and enthusiasm, more in the form of an affirmation than an approbation. And have you not noticed that he speaks to his daughter in French? Saying métrique instead of metric is an affectation, but I suspect the motivation behind doing it is much more to do with the fact that he's French Canadian than to inject a sense of 'foreignness' - to a French Canadian there's nothing 'foreign' about le patois Français, to them it's a domestic product. It's easy to forget that for some of those Snow Mexicans sneaking over the border to raid the Hazard Fraught, French is their everyday language.

I know all that. When he gives units in "métrique", people complain "What is a key low?"

[schmitt trigger]

@ Altair8800:
I don't know how long it took you to compose that, but it is certainly the post of the month. 

[KL27x]

besides its many shortcomings

If the French people were united in using imperial in the 1800's they would not have invented metric. And today's scientists would have settled on using a single unit-base (say inches for distance and lb's for weight, but it really doesn't matter which ones we use) for ease of comparing apples to apples and doing conversions with a formula vs writing it all out. There would be zero difference in science, engineering, and chemistry.

There are 437.5 grains in "an oz." An oz is an oz, unless otherwise specified. The other oz's continue to exist because people still use them in specific industries. If an industry decided they want to use Troy kilograms, which are 958 grams, that would not be the fault of metric.

There's a drawback to metric. After an asteroid hits earth, the length of a meter will change, and of our constants will have to be adjusted.

[tooki]

besides its many shortcomings

If the French people were united in using imperial in the 1800's they would not have invented metric. And today's scientists would have settled on using a single unit-base (say inches for distance and lb's for weight, but it really doesn't matter which ones we use) for ease of comparing apples to apples and doing conversions with a formula vs writing it all out. There would be zero difference in science, engineering, and chemistry.

There are 437.5 grains in "an oz." An oz is an oz, unless otherwise specified. The other oz's continue to exist because people still use them in specific industries. If an industry decided they want to use Troy kilograms, which are 958 grams, that would not be the fault of metric.

There's a drawback to metric. After an asteroid hits earth, the length of a meter will change, and of our constants will have to be adjusted.

Please stop stripping off the author from the quote tags and/or quoting by copying and pasting by hand. If you just use the quote button on a post, then the quote tag becomes clickable so that readers can click it to see the source of the quoted text.

[Altair8800]

@ Altair8800:
I don't know how long it took you to compose that, but it is certainly the post of the month. 

The above was written by an anonymous UseNet Oracle priest before the Internet.  The WWW/hyperlink/Internet as we know it started in early 90's but really took off exponentially in mid 90's.  Before then, there was USENET (and Internet Relay Chat and email) in which UseNet was an early Forum Boards in the 80's connecting mostly Unix and Main Frame computers.

Talking about these old things, I'm not just dating myself, I'm carbon dating myself... 

[soldar]

In Spanish we call each of those chocolate squares an ounce (onza). It took me many years, well into adulthood, to realize "onza" did not really mean "a square of chocolate" but was actually the weight (mass) of one of those squares.

[bsfeechannel]

besides its many shortcomings

If the French people were united in using imperial in the 1800's they would not have invented metric.

If the French decided to use imperial we would still be defining the inch as the length of some nasty appendix of the anatomy of the King of England.

Instead the meter is defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum in 1/299,792,458 seconds.

[bsfeechannel]

In Spanish we call each of those chocolate squares an ounce (onza). It took me many years, well into adulthood, to realize "onza" did not really mean "a square of chocolate" but was actually the weight (mass) of one of those squares.

The Spanish ounce is 443,68 grains. Troy grains, that is.

[soldar]

I think Troy grains were mostly grown in the UK.

The customary Spanish yard (vara) was a bit shorter at 836 mm.
while the traditional Spanish pound (libra) was a bit larger at 460 gr.

Interestingly, in China when they adopted the decimal metric system they redefined the local "pound" as 500gr and when you go to buy groceries all prices are marked per half kilo and not per kilo.

America could do that. Define the "new pound" as 500 gr and continue to use "pounds".  Same thing with the yard, etc.

[bsfeechannel]

This kind of adaptation was done all over the world. You find sewage pipes in 25, 50, 100, 150mm. What are those? The old 1, 2, 4 and 6 inches.

I have two oscilloscope CRTs. One is a Toshiba 130BHB31 and the other is an El-Menco 5DEP1. 130mm, 5 inches. They are electrically and dimensionally equivalent.

When I was a kid we used to have 30cm rulers. Just shy of 1 foot. My Faber-Castell 52/82 slide rule has numbers spaced on the L scale by 2.5 cm. A standard door is 2.10m x 90cm = 7 x 3 feet. Pine wood planks can be found in 30 x 60, 90, 120, 150 or 180 cm, respectively 1 x 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 feet.

The world saw metric and didn't blink twice.

EDIT: 150 mm is equivalent to 6 inches, not 5 as I had previously written.

[CatalinaWOW]

This kind of adaptation was done all over the world. You find sewage pipes in 25, 50, 100, 150mm. What are those? The old 1, 2, 4 and 5 inches.

I have two oscilloscope CRTs. One is a Toshiba 130BHB31 and the other is an El-Menco 5DEP1. 130mm, 5 inches. They are electrically and dimensionally equivalent.

When I was a kid we used to have 30cm rulers. Just shy of 1 foot. My Faber-Castell 52/82 slide rule has numbers spaced on the L scale by 2.5 cm. A standard door is 2.10m x 90cm = 7 x 3 feet. Pine wood planks can be found in 30 x 60, 90, 120, 150 or 180 cm, respectively 1 x 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 feet.

The world saw metric and didn't blink twice.

Sort of agree.  The world saw metric, and some two hundred years later most of the world has adopted it. Sort of.   So perhaps by the time a quarter of a millenium has passed the whole world will be there.

The real question is why the rest of the world cares how the US goes about its business.  To the extent of making stuff up.  Like blueskulls algorithm for computing the window dimensions.  A quick check tells me it is technically correct, but it isn't the way a traditional unit person would do this.  Most would convert the feet to inches,  or add 48 (4x12) to the remainder inches.  Even you metric people can handle that math.  They would ignore the sixteenth of an inch, just as most would not sweat a fraction of a millimeter, particularly in a framed window that will very likely vary from top to bottom by several millimeters (1/4 of an inch).  So now the problem is to remove 3/8 from each side, or 3/4 from the total dimension.  Wham you are done, and the calculations are trivially more difficult than in metric units. 

It is worthwhile reading the Wikipedia (English) article on metrification.  It may surprise many how far down the road the US is, and how widely traditional units survive in many "metric" countries.  It is also worth looking at the widely referenced Mars Climate Orbiter fiasco from a slightly different point of view.  The US specifies metric for military and space applications.  The NASA contract specified metric.  But one supplier illegally supplied traditional data.  Of course this probably wouldn't have happened if the the US was 100 percent metric and had been since the data on the motor involved was originally collected.  But it also wouldn't have happened if a dimensional check had been performed.  A wise step even in completely metric countries, because cm are not interchangeable with meters, and because weird stuff happens.  I have seen torques expressed (in countries that have been metric for over a century) in dyne-cm (not SI but metric), and gm-cm.  These two are interchangeable only if you don't care about an order of magnitude.  Blaming it solely on the use of traditional units leaves you exposed to other forms of stupidity.

[mansaxel]

A wise step even in completely metric countries, because cm are not interchangeable with meters, and because weird stuff happens. 

That is a matter of multiplication by 10 (an appropriate number of times), which, yes of course, needs to be done correctly. But it is also trivial, which "thou to inches is times 1000, feet to inches is times 12, feet to yards is times 3, yards to miles is 1760" is not, in comparison.  While it is true, on each side of the fence, we are more used to our own method, moving decimal points is always going to be easier a priori than remembering a non-linear sequence of multipliers.  And then we've not started talking about relations between length, volume and weight, because there it is outright silly.

[wraper]

America didn't choose imperial. We were handed it by the Brits. I wouldn't say we actively choose to keep it. We just don't have incentive to change it officially/completely. We already took the knee to the rest of the world by changing all of our units of measurement to be defined by global (metric) standard. Why should anyone in another country care, beyond that?

Because you are exporting this shit. Both in hardware and IP. Those effing imperial screws used in some equipment I service are driving me nuts.

[IanJ]

In the UK we still have road distances and speed limits in miles despite having most other things in SI units... strange really.
... and when it is really hot the tabloid papers say... "Oooo what a scorcher <big number>F"... I seriously doubt many people understand F in the UK now... not me anyway. 

At least in the US we're all Imperial. The UK has a bastardized mix--like you said, road distances and speed limits in miles/MPH, temperatures in C. Food weights in grams, but people weight in stone (talk about a bizarre unit). Drinks in pints (and not even the same pint we have in the US).

In the UK I think it's a good mix of good workable units and keeping some sort of heritage going.
MPH, miles, degC, grammes, stones, pints, millimetres, centimetres...........all good.

Ian

[Tepe]

In the UK I think it's a good mix of good workable units and keeping some sort of heritage going.
MPH, miles, degC, grammes, stones, pints, millimetres, centimetres...........all good.

still weird and half-hearted, though 

[vk6zgo]

This kind of adaptation was done all over the world. You find sewage pipes in 25, 50, 100, 150mm. What are those? The old 1, 2, 4 and 5 inches.

Some pipe dimensions are ID, some are OD, & some don't make any sense in either system.

I have two oscilloscope CRTs. One is a Toshiba I.130BHB31 and the other is an El-Menco 5DEP1. 130mm, 5 inches. They are electrically and dimensionally equivalent.

When I was a kid we used to have 30cm rulers. Just shy of 1 foot. My Faber-Castell 52/82 slide rule has numbers spaced on the L scale by 2.5 cm. A standard door is 2.10m x 90cm = 7 x 3 feet. Pine wood planks can be found in 30 x 60, 90, 120, 150 or 180 cm, respectively 1 x 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 feet.

The world saw metric and didn't blink twice.

Back in the day, when most Oscilloscopes in Australia were made either in this country or the UK, the graticules were drawn with centimetre spacings.
The various settings were popularly known as "volts/cm" & "time/cm".

Remember, this was way back, deep in the real "Imperial" measurement days!

When most Oscilloscopes were from the USA, with different, (but fairly similar) spacings, it became "volts/div" & "time/div".

[vk6zgo]

Man, why so melodramatic? Is the US adhering to a global standard that has been proved to work better than all the previous versions a token of resignation?

Come on! You should celebrate.

Erm, no. First off, you read to much into "take a knee." It's not a matter of pride to me. I could give a shit.

Changing the definition of an inch from "that piece of metal" kept in a dark safe at a specific temperature and humidity in our department of national weights and measures to being a derivative of cm has nothing to do with metric being better or worse.

It won't be a "derivative of cm"-----in the S.I.system, the cm is a "deprecated unit", so the inch would probably be expressed in mm.

If you want a tomato to be a tomato no matter what country, you have to choose one or the other to be the standard. Aside from having more traction, the thing that is nice about metric is how it is "calibrated." If you get into a squabble with someone else over what a kg actually is, you could theoretically actually do the measurements rather than have to take the word of the guy that has "that piece of metal."

Once you've agreed on that, you ought not care if some other people prefer to express height on a drivers license as 1.49 meter, or 14.9 decimeters, or 149 cm.

Again, the SI system wouldn't like any of  those options, but would  prefer the height be 1490mm.
Common usage (& sense) has settled upon 149 cm, but I would personally prefer 1.49 metres.

Or feet, or inches or hands. As long as the conversion has been defined, and the calibration is from the same standard. This standard which we've all agree upon is derived from the earth, which we all have equal access to.

Pray tell!
The metre used to be defined as a fraction of the circumference of the Earth at the Equatot, but that changed many years ago.

You think we won't need to know how to use ratios and do conversions, anymore, if we convince stupid Americans to convert to the "superior" metric system?

The reason imperial will take centuries more to die out, if it ever does, is because it's not a big deal. Other than a few exceptions, say brit pints vs US pints, imperial has all its hens in order, and has had them that way since centuries before metric was even born.

The US "customary" measurement system (which is from about the same era as the original Metric system), maybe, but the Imperial system in a wider sense is nightmarish, with such delights as "Chains" ( there are 22 "links"in a chain), or "Furlongs", or the one with three names ("Rod", "Pole"or "Perch"), or the "Stone(14 lbs) or "the"hundredweight" (112 lbs)!
All leaving out the ones which it has in common with the US system, like "Troy ounces" & "Nautical Miles"

If there were many kinds of imperial (and/or other alternatives) measurements, then it would be a bigger deal. The reason France invented metric and europe adopted it is because they were living with hundreds of different competing standards, at the time.

The units I have mentioned are exactly that, "many types of Imperial".

The US customary system was, in its day, a brave effort to cut through the dross the Imperal system had accumulated over the centuries, but it didn't go far enough.

A misstep was to  choose the gallon quantity used in the British brewing industry, instead of the water one!
I'm starting to see a common thread here---- the Sydney colony in Oz had a "Rum Rebellion"
Maybe the Brits thought that they could control their fractious colonists by keeping them drunk!

[vk6zgo]

America didn't choose imperial. We were handed it by the Brits. I wouldn't say we actively choose to keep it. We just don't have incentive to change it officially/completely. We already took the knee to the rest of the world by changing all of our units of measurement to be defined by global (metric) standard. Why should anyone in another country care, beyond that?

Because you are exporting this shit. Both in hardware and IP. Those effing imperial screws used in some equipment I service are driving me nuts.

They always have, even in "Imperial" countries because the US "customary" ones aren't compatible with the common small screws used in those countries.

Of course, the same applied to 3mm Metric screws from Germany & Japan in the old days.
The Germans  used a fine thread, the Japanese, a coarse one!

[vk6zgo]

Sort of a "generic" comment on the "window blind" problem:-
Most people would measure the window opening with a tape measure, determine the gap they wanted, count back from the initial measurement twice, read the measurement off the tape & call it good,

Alternatively, because it is sometimes hard to get someone to hold the end of the tape, they might get a length of dowel  curtain rod or similar, a bit longer than the window opening, push it up against the window frame(maybe securing it with tape), mark where it crossed the window frame at both ends.

Now determining the gap they require, using the tape measure, measure either twice that distance in from one end of the measuring rod, or the required gap in from each end, marking again.
Now, they can, at their leisure, determine the required blind width by measuring between the points marked on the rod in the last step.

No conversions, no calculations, system independent!

[bsfeechannel]

The real question is why the rest of the world cares how the US goes about its business.

wraper has answered that question beautifully, but even if that were not the problem, this is a forum and what people do in forums is to discuss anything.

It is worthwhile reading the Wikipedia (English) article on metrification.  It may surprise many how far down the road the US is, and how widely traditional units survive in many "metric" countries.

Resistance is futile, imperial has been assimilated.

The US specifies metric for military and space applications.  The NASA contract specified metric.

This doesn't justify the US, because metrication there is not on par with the rest of the world, that uses metric for just about everything.

From the point of view of someone outside the US, what it seems is that the government tried to convince the people of the benefits of a modern system of units several times. But the people wouldn't listen, choosing to give ears to localism and other emotional arguments.

The government, the military and a significant portion of the industry said "Bugger that. We cannot heed that ignorant populace. We're ditching this imperial crap and changing to metric right away. We can't afford to lag behind the rest of the world."

So while you see this as a token of how very far the US have gone in the adoption of the metric system, the rest of the world sees how the government, the military and the industry disavow that lame choice of staying imperial.

Ιt is things like that that make the US an object of derision and contempt.

[soldar]

The metre used to be defined as a fraction of the circumference of the Earth at the Equatot, but that changed many years ago.

Not the circumference of the Earth at the equator but a meridian circle. One quadrant of the meridian was supposed to be about 40 million meters but I do not believe the meter was ever really defined that way. I believe it was defined by the metal rod which, in turn, was intended to be that fraction of the quadrant but I do not believe the quadrant was measured with enough precision to define the meter that way.

There was a lot of very interesting scientific expeditions in the 18th century for the purpose of measuring the length of the meridian circle.

[richard.cs]

The cost consideration works both ways, not just that it's likely more expensive for Americans to buy stuff produced in lower volumes essentially just for them, but it also puts the rest of us off buying things you make.

I know on multiple occasions I have avoided buying something USA-made because I didn't want the hassle of having to find mating screws etc. locally. People not buying your stuff because they don't want the cost or hassle of finding 6-32 screws, UNEF bolts, oddball pipe threads, etc. limits your export market. And that's before we even get into overzealous export rules, between the two there are a lot of times when I just exclude US products from searches.

[Tepe]

One quadrant of the meridian was supposed to be about 40 million meters

~40,000 km is the entire circumference.