Category Archives: Metric History

Child’s Play

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By The Metric Maven

Bulldog Edition

Recently I was visiting Albuquerque New Mexico. While there, I went to the National Museum of Nuclear Science. It was an interesting enough experience, but it was the gift store that made the largest impact. On the back wall was a number of educational laminated exercise sheets. They are about 440 mm x 305 mm in size. The first to catch my attention was a sheet intended to “educate” young people about U.S. weights and measures. The U.S. weights and measures sheet seemed very simplified, and is reproduced below:

The typeface is large and legible, about 10 mm or so in height. There is plenty of space between the lines of text and the graphic design is very open and accessible.

When I found the metric version of this “educational resource” I was aghast. The typeface is reduced to about 5 millimeters in height, and the graphic design is cluttered. Clearly when one looks at this metric presentation, and compares it with the U.S. version, the metric version is just so complicated that only a Nobel Prize winner could understand it. The message is clear, U.S. Ye Olde English is simple, the metric system is complicated. The metric version is reproduced below for comparison:

The U.S. version has no metric equivalents on it. The metric version has Ye Old English equivalents on it. This is the first source of clutter. The second source of clutter is the prefix cluster around unity. The length section has millimeters, centimeters, decimeters, dekameters, hectometers and Kilometers. The same set of prefixes is used for the liter and the gram, with Ye Olde English equivalents added.

In my essay Naughtin and 1929, I wrote about a newspaper that was introducing the metric system that year and made it appear much more complex than needed. What was done there seems like a peccadillo compared with this group of Mormons making coffee. We are treated to a history lesson  that explains: “The Metric System was first proposed in France in 1670 by Gabriel Mouton. It is a system based on mathematics and not the size of a king’s body part.” No, the system part of the metric system was proposed by John Wilkins in 1668. It relies on scientific phenomena as a basis, and simplicity in expression. It is pointed out that the U.S. is “the only major country in the world not to adopt it.”

This product is called a Painless Learning Placemat, and has a 2014 copyright, so it is not a relic from the 1970s, it is contemporary obfuscation. At the bottom of each placemat is “Made in U.S.A.” The Ye Olde English measures placemat does not have the center section taken up with a history of measurement, and the SI prefixes with the prefix cluster around unity added. It does have SI Punctuation Rules. Rule #2 is not to use plurals on the unit symbols, so it’s: “hg not hgs.” One would not want to get their hectograms in a bunch. Rule #3 is there are no periods after units, it’s: “cg not cg.”, so make sure you have your centigrams without periods, as you will also be using lots of centigrams in your new fantasy metric world.

I will give the author(s) some credit for the other rules—mostly. Rule #1 is to leave a space between a numerical value and its metric symbol. They have 5 g not 5g. Rule #4 is to use a space instead of a comma for large numbers. However, the space they use in their example is so small that a young person (or the instructor) might be confused that a space exists. The kerning is awful:

Perhaps 10 000 and 10,000 might have been a better example?

Rule #5 advocates a leading zero on decimals. Their example is 0.6 mm not .6 mm. This is good, but when possible in a list of presented values, whole numbers are most expressive. 600 μm is succinct and this possible choice should be explained.

The reverse side of this placemat has “metric exercises” for the young person. They mostly involve the prefix cluster around unity, and therefore are for “practical” everyday use:

There are many more exercises in futility on the back side of the placemat. One is to “Draw a line from the prefix  to its correct numerical value.” These include mm, cm, dm, dk, hm, km with 10, 0.01, 0.1, 100, 0.001, 1000. One is then to take the prefix symbols and match them with the full prefix cluster. This includes mg, kg, dg, dkg, cg, hg, with dekagram, hectogram, milligram, kilogram, decigram and centigram. Those of you that are metric pedants will immediately notice that rather than using da for deca, this placemat has dk instead. It seems apparent to me, that when confronted with dkg, it’s possible for a young person to see it as a decikilogram. Well over 75-80% of the area of the backside of the metric placemat is taken up with the important task of understanding hecto, deca (sorry….deka), deci and centi. Metric is not better by 1000 on this placemat, it’s ten times worse. This “educational tool” is an unintentional argument for eliminating the prefix cluster around unity.

What young person would choose metric over Ye Olde English when they see nothing but complexity staring at them? The idea that more prefixes exist, such as Mega, Giga, micro, nano and so on, would certainly produce loathing for this complicated system, and budding American exceptionalism could possibly follow. The back side of the Ye Olde English placemat is far less dense, and tells you what you don’t have to remember:

The placemat does not mention Troy versus Avoirdupois pounds, even though silver and gold are weighed with Troy, and that seems fairly important. If a child understood the actual simplicity of the metric system, without the prefix cluster around unity, and was not conditioned with this misleading pre-metric placemat to see the U.S. weights and measures as simpler, they would revolt when they came across this set of exercises on the back side of the Ye Olde English placemat:

The metric placemat is so padded with worthless and pointless exercises, that it would probably convince the poor child that the Ye Olde English reverse side is easier than the back of the metric placemat. Considering the convoluted and misleading metric backside, it might actually be just about as bad—but of course it’s only typical of ignorance in action.

The U.S. placemat does not bother to relate any of the U.S. measurement units to metric units, but the metric placemat does—when it should not. In an actual adoption of the metric system, one changes to metric exclusively, and never looks back. The U.S. placemat has a small box explaining how to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. On the U.S. back side, one is to parrot back this simple algorithm. The metric place mat has extensive exercises to convert a list of Celsius values to Fahrenheit and vice-versa.

What young person would not be repelled by the metric system when it’s presented in such an overly and artificially complicated manner? I’m glad I was never exposed to a “learning accessory” like this one when I was a child. It would have brought out my inner Chucky if I was faced with the choice. Whether I approach “science communicators” on The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, High School teachers, scientists, engineers, or other educators, there is a virtual eye roll, and a sanctimonious dismissal tinged with “I already know all about the metric system” or worse, the assertion that “it doesn’t matter what system of measure one uses.” I would like to think that most educators are interested in teaching and not simply parroting, but at this point it looks like “Polly want’s a hectometer.”

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.

Metric Wishcraft

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By The Metric Maven

In response to an Op-Ed I wrote promoting the metric system, one commentator stated in opposition to my proposition:

Also saying electricity and gas are measured in improper units then says they should be in gigajoules….kilowatt-hr  and BTUs are amounts of energy just like joules. You can convert BTUs to kWhs and kilowatt hr is metric.  He’s an “engineer” he can convert easily between the two

The internet has provided a place where any immediate thoughtless ejaculation of words can be posted. This concatenation of confabulation was no exception. The specific assertion that caught my attention is his statement that a “kilowatt hr is metric.” Well, I’m afraid I’d have to demur. A kilowatt is metric, and when expressed by this “engineer” in a more fundamental manner is 1000 joules per second. So far, so metric. There is a problem however with multiplying a joule/second by an hour. This will produce joule*hours/second, which is not good dimensional analysis. The base unit for time in the metric system (SI) is the second. An hour is not a metric unit, and multiplying watts by hours immediately disqualifies Kilowatt-hours as a metric expression.

I can only assume that the BTUs were brought up as the units this “commentor” assumed are used for natural gas. My gas bill has the energy of natural gas designated with therms. There is not a BTU to be found. If there were BTUs they would very likely be designated with MMBtu or mmBtu which are one million BTUs. Why the MM or mm?—well Wikipedia—what do you have to say?:

The unit MBtu or mBtu was defined as one thousand BTU, presumably from the Roman numeral system where “M” or “m” stands for one thousand (1,000). This notation is easily confused with the SI mega- (M) prefix, which denotes multiplication by a factor of one million (×106), or with the SI milli- (m) prefix, which denotes division by a factor of one thousand (×10−3). To avoid confusion, many companies and engineers use the notation “MMBtu” or “mmBtu” to represent one million BTU (although, confusingly, MM in Roman numerals would traditionally represent 2,000) and in many contexts this form of notation is deprecated and discouraged in favour of the more modern SI prefixes. Alternatively, the term therm may be used to represent 100,000 (or 105) BTU, and quad for 1015 BTU. Some companies also use BtuE6 in order to reduce confusion between 103 BTU and 106 BTU.[8]

Reduce confusion??? Ok, I think I can summarize that the BTU is a completely ill-defined, readily confusing non-metric unit, which can be expressed in several non-intuitive ways, one of which is therms. There is an interesting metric coincidence that it is often accepted by agreement (in other words we will pretend) that:

In natural gas, by convention 1 MMBtu (1 million BTU) = 1.054615 GJ.[9]

This is close to a Gigajoule. How about we simplify life and use Gigajoules in place of MMBtu? I have shown how simply a utility bill can be expressed with Gigajoules. I realize that the “commenter” is probably so well-off that he need not be bothered with quantifying energy usage, but this “engineer” does, and sees no reason for allowing confusopolies to continue to obscure billing information.

One can also note that his use of a simile: “BTUs are amounts of energy just like joules.”  is not exactly apt. Wikipedia also has this to say:

A BTU is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 avoirdupois pound of liquid water by 1 degree Fahrenheit at a constant pressure of one atmosphere.[2][3] As with the calorie, several definitions of the BTU exist, because the temperature response of water to heat energy is non-linear. This means that the change in temperature of a water mass caused by adding a certain amount of heat to it will be a function of the water’s initial temperature. Definitions of the BTU based on different water temperatures can therefore vary by up to 0.5%

The BTU is not a well-defined unit for energy, and neither is the calorie, that’s why the joule is used for energy by Engineers, scientists, and persons who want accurate energy bills, and those that have left the 19th century behind.

The “discussions” that occur in comment sections of—well—any blog or posting, have those who assert with great confidence, “information” that sounds right to those who are ill-informed, in an attempt to convince both those reading the assertion and the person making it, to remain so. The length of this blog is testament to this. Note how many words it took to deal with the flawed assertion of but one person. (With apologies to Mark Twain): The most outrageous ignorance that can be propagated will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might. This is what metric proponents encounter constantly.

Postscript:

CNN posted a piece in their “Great American Stories” series entitled Refusing to Give an Inch. The entire story is essentially a celebration of U.S. failure. How is that a Great American Story? The majority of the piece was cribbed from John Bemelmans Marciano’s anti-metric polemic Whatever Happened To the Metric System. A review of this monograph may be found here.

I was contacted by one of the authors by email last February. The story was to be about the controversy over the metric road signs in Arizona.  I sent the reporter links to A Tale of Two Iowans, The Chain Gang, and my response to NIST’s rejection of a We The People Petition to change the U.S. to the metric system. I told the author I was willing to talk at length, at anytime, and that they could find much useful information contained in my blogs.

The video that accompanies the written story is surprising in that a number of people interviewed didn’t seem bothered by the metric road signs. They even seemed to have a fondness for them. One person who recently moved there, soon didn’t notice the difference and seemed fine with the signs. This supports my thesis about The Metric Populist Revolt That Didn’t Happen. Much like the California DOT, that went from metric back to Ye Olde English, the Arizona spokesman speculated about dual-unit signs. He saw that as “the best of all worlds for everyone.” This is simply a way to first give U.S. citizens a way of ignoring the metric designations, and then eventually purging them. See Naughtin’s First Law.

The reason for the replacement of the metric road signs, which look perfectly fine, is they don’t have as much refection at night as desired. I suspect that all of the signs in Arizona must have been changed because of this new specification. Strangely there was no public outcry about the “massive costs” involved with replacing all the Ye Olde English signs. That would have been a perfect time to make all the road signs in Arizona metric. Metric resistance is not about cost, it has no rational basis.

I had hoped for a story with something other than an extended interview with Marciano that contains statements like:

Marciano, however, makes a credible argument for the old way of counting, which is based on everyday things and parts of the body.

“People say the metric system makes sense,” Marciano says, “But in nature we don’t think about dividing things by 10, do we? We think of halves and feet and thirds.”

Acres, for instance, were based on the amount of land a man could plow in a day.

“Throughout history we have measured things by ourselves,” Marciano says. “We are really losing something with metric.”

And another thing: People think the metric system has something to do with science.
It doesn’t, Marciano says, except that it is used in science and every scientist will
probably put forth a convincing argument for why it’s silly not to be metric.

The metric system is very “body friendly.” a long pace is almost exactly a meter (1000 mm). I’ve done this and checked buildings with a laser. The dimensions are remarkably close. The distance between a person’s nose and the tips of their fingers is about a meter. The width of a male hand, Marciano’s hobby horse measurement poster unit, is generally 100 mm. So is the length of many index fingers. The width of a pinky fingernail is about 10 mm.

I have dedicated my life to engineering  and science. Marciano’s statement that the metric system has nothing to do with science is simply at odds with the last two centuries of history. It is like stating that biology has nothing to do with lifeforms. I direct my readers to my essay The Americans Who Defined the Meter. The fact that the Earth is about 40 Megameters (40 000 Km) in circumference, is no simple coincidence. Englishman John Wilkins was tasked by the Royal Society of London to develop a universal measurement system that all scientists could use. When France finally implemented the metric system, it was guided by a number of very famous scientists. It’s science all the way down. The metric system has also been refined to make everyday measurement much easier for everyday people than Ye Olde English. The details are in my blogs.

CNN further informs us that:

…. John Bemelmans Marciano gave up writing the popular “Madeline” children’s books started by his grandfather and last year published “Whatever Happened To The Metric System?”

Marciano says his young editor had no idea the United States had come within millimeters of metrication. The book reveals a fascinating history of how this nation ended up keeping a system in which 16 ounces make a pound, 12 inches make a foot and 3 feet make a yard.

Marciano knows that we never came within a barleycorn of becoming metric. I’ve detailed this, here, and here and it’s tiresome to have metric revisionist history constantly propagated by Marciano and the lazy media. Marciano’s book does not explain what happened to metric system, the book has almost no metric content, and is only a long juvenile paean of schadenfreude directed at the U.S. metric failure. If you want to know why the U.S. is not metric, you will not find the answer in Marciano’s book, you will find it in Hector Vera’s PhD thesis: The Social Life of Measures Metrication in the United States and Mexico, 1798-2004 (September 2011). Worst of all for me was this (forgive me for re-quoting):

There are blogs like “Metric Maven” and even a book on the subject. John Bemelmans Marciano gave up writing the popular “Madeline” children’s books started by his grandfather and last year published “Whatever Happened To The Metric System?”

This, in my view, makes it look like my blog and Marciano’s anti-metric polemic are somehow complimentary or equivalent when they are completely at odds. I guess that it was good that at least I have a link. It would have been nice if this had been an article that does not celebrate a disaster as an American triumph, but I guess no matter what happened, in CNN’s view the lack of the metric system is a “Great American Story.”

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.