The mid-1970s were a period of metric delusion in the US. The entire world was changing over to the metric system, and because of that, people were told we were also doing so. Industry and government had no intention of changing anything, just as they had since the latter part of the 19th century.

It appears that Isaac Asimov was hopeful about metrication in 1975 when he wrote the book The Ends of The Earth about the polar regions of our world. On page 2 he writes:

The Sun, to be sure, is 150,000,000 kilometers* from the Earth …..

The footnote reads:

* Almost the entire world, except for the United States, now uses the “metric system” of measurement. Scientists everywhere, even including American scientists, use it exclusively. To use anything else in dealing with matters involving the whole Earth would be provincial. I will therefore use the metric system and give equivalents in footnotes now and then ….

The metric training wheels come off almost immediately, and the book is essentially all metric after the first dozen pages or so. What struck me was how seamlessly Asimov was able to write with metric. On page 114 he wrote this:

Magellan had no choice but to move farther southward, and on October 21, 1520, he finally came to an inlet that seemed promising. He made his way through it under horribly stormy conditions—550 kilometers of torture—and then came out into the open ocean at last, under conditions of such calm that, with tears running down his cheeks, Magellan called it the “Pacific Ocean” (“peaceful”), the name it bears to this day.

Throughout the book Asimov uses only metric units: grams, meters, Kilograms and so on. It is quite a surprise as contemporary popular science books continue to insist on Ye Olde English units, rationalizing it as Americans don’t use metric.

The book uses cubic centimeters:

Pg 226 Most solid substances that dissolve in water can do so in amounts that vary with the temperature of the water. In almost every case, the warmer the water, the greater the extent to which it can dissolve a particular substance. Consider for instance, a compound known as magnesium chloride. A hundred cubic centimeters of water at a temperature of 20 C. will dissolve 54 grams of magnesium chloride. Bring that same quantity of water to the boiling point, 100 C., and it will dissolve 73 grams.

Which readers know I would eschew, as the medical profession appears to have done in the US. On the next page Asimov shows the redundancy of cubic centimeters:

Pg 227 As it happens, the two gasses that make up the bulk (99 percent) of the dry atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen, both dissolve only slightly. for instance at 0 C., 100 milliliters of water will dissolve only 0.007 grams of oxygen and only 0.006 grams of nitrogen.

He seamlessly, and it appears unconsciously, substitutes milliliters for cubic centimeters, demonstrating milliliters is fine for volume.

Despite his exceptional effort to use metric only, Isaac succumbs to using Ye Olde English Prefix Modifiers:

Page 275 The Sun is …. surrounded by a “corona,” a very thin atmosphere extending outward from the Sun in all directions in sufficient density to be detectable for millions of kilometers.

Skipping the pigfish prefixing, it could have been: “…. in sufficient density to be detectable for Gigameters.”

The book is a window into what might have been if the US were not so ignorantly sanctimonious about its measures and its inability to reform.

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Paul Trusten, Vice President of the US Metric Association contracted COVID-19 in November and passed away on the 5th of December 2020. He often left comments about the essays presented here, and had been active in metric issues since the 1970s. His contribution will be missed.

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If you liked this essay and wish to support the work of The Metric Maven, please visit his Patreon Page and contribute. Also purchase his books about the metric system:

The first book is titled: Our Crumbling Invisible Infrastructure. It is a succinct set of essays  that explain why the absence of the metric system in the US is detrimental to our personal heath and our economy. These essays are separately available for free on my website,  but the book has them all in one place in print. The book may be purchased from Amazon here.

The second book is titled The Dimensions of the Cosmos. It takes the metric prefixes from yotta to Yocto and uses each metric prefix to describe a metric world. The book has a considerable number of color images to compliment the prose. It has been receiving good reviews. I think would be a great reference for US science teachers. It has a considerable number of scientific factoids and anecdotes that I believe would be of considerable educational use. It is available from Amazon here.

The third book is called Death By A Thousand Cuts, A Secret History of the Metric System in The United States. This monograph explains how we have been unable to legally deal with weights and measures in the United States from George Washington, to our current day. This book is also available on Amazon here.