Category Archives: Metric Reform

Jackalope Tales

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By The Metric Maven

Bulldog Edition

There are stories we tell ourselves to bring order to our world, and to define a culture within it. It is generally assumed that when scientific histories are written, they, unlike others, are thoroughly researched and checked against primary sources. Engineering and scientific discoveries have origin stories and the people involved become an important part of the narrative.

One interesting person and eponymous group is Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. It is stated that Pythagoras was the first to prove the Pythagorean theorem. His group of ancient nerds were vegetarians, and also eschewed beans from their diet. Pythagoras had a strange birthmark on his thigh. I once read that Pythagoreans would not use metal to poke fires and after rising in the morning would smooth out the imprint they left in their bedclothes. Alberto A. Martinez in his book The Cult of Pythagoras: Math and Myths offers up a multitude of stories about the man and his followers.

According to Martinez, there is just one problem with the tale that Pythagoras proved the Pythagorean theorem: “… the story that Pythagoras found, proved, or celebrated the hypotenuse theorem dissolves into nothing.” There is no direct evidence of any kind that he had any interest in mathematics. Martinez studies contagious stories that have been passed down from century to century and embellished along the way. The author presents a table that summarizes the “game of telephone” that historians engage in:

The-Illusion-of-Knowlege
Pythagoreans

If Pythagoras wrote anything, his works were lost to antiquity. Gradually, like a tiny snowball rolling down a hill, layer after layer of detail began to accumulate on the tiny nugget of Cicero’s unsubstantiated assertion. According to Martinez, author Eric Temple Bell in his excellent and entertaining book Men of Mathematics is a prominent voice that added to this snowball of myth (and others).

Eric Temple Bell claimed: “Pythagoras then imported proof into mathematics. This is his greatest achievement. Before him geometry had been largely a collection of rules of thumb empirically arrived at without any clear indication of the rules, and without the slightest suspicion that all were deducible from a comparatively small number of postulates.” Bell wrote in an engaging way, but he echoed false anecdotes, adding imagined details and exaggerations.

The author offers another assertion about Pythagoras which has no primary source:

Diogenes Laertius said that Aristoxenus the musician claimed that Pythagoras was “the first person who introduced weights and measures among the Greeks.” (pg 205)

Martinez goes on to describe the slow creation of the tale of Archimedes’ death, and how it blossomed from an absence of information into a full-blown tale of his death at the hands of a Roman solder as he was drawing a mathematical proof in sand. This story of Archimedes’ death has been passed down and enhanced from Cicero, to Plutarch, to E.T. Bell in 1937, to Peter Beckmann in 1971, and Steven Hawking in 2005.

When I was in grade school, my class was asked to add the integer numbers from 1 to 100 and give the answer. I began thinking about how much paper it would take to do this, and wondered what we had done to deserve this type of punishment. Why was this assignment offered? Because it is erroneously believed that the mathematical genius Karl Friedrich Gauss, when he was a boy, had shown his mathematical promise by realizing that he could add 1 + 100 = 101, 99+2 =101, 98+3=101 and so on 50 times to make 101 x 50 or 5050 and quickly obtain the answer. It is said the boy offered up a general formula for the sum of integers from 1 to any end number. There is just one problem with this historical tale, it has no historical text or evidence to back it. It is a sort of scientific urban legend.

Recently The Atlantic, on June 6th, 2016 (2016-06-06), for reasons only they know, offered up two articles about the metric system. The first article is titled: Why the Metric System Hasn’t Failed in the U.S. And has an important place in education. Its author is Victoria Clayton. She interviews High School teacher Sally Mitchell who has been involved in metric promotion for some time. When Clayton queried her about why the US has not become metric:

Mitchell said. “And here’s the answer: We have, many years ago.” Well, yes and no. While many U.S. enterprises—from soft drinks and distilled spirits to cars, photographic equipment, pharmaceuticals, and even the U.S. military—are essentially metric, everyday use—Americans’ body-weight scales, recipes, and road signs, for example—hasn’t converted. And neither has the country’s educational system.

Clayton introduced a bit of healthy skepticism into Mitchell’s claim: “we have, many years ago” converted to the metric system, when it is clear to the most casual observer, we have not.

Next we read:

“I would say that the United States of America is at least 40 percent metric, perhaps even a little over 50 percent metric in practical terms,” said David Pearl, an Oregon government worker who, in his free time, is a self-appointed U.S. metric historian….”

This chestnut of 50% metric has been waved around probably for decades now, and there is not a single academic study, reference, or anything else, other than desired truthiness to back this claim up. I would like to know just how much metric is used in the US. I would like to see scholarly studies about metric usage that can be cited, and that offer up actual numbers. At this point I have no information that is substantial. I have my personal experience, and that can almost always be counted upon to be flawed.

A new tale with an old excuse is offered to explain the absence of metric in the US:

In the early days, the metric proponents lost elections and the customary—that is, pounds and inches—guys won. The issue continued to get tossed around, however. Then around the late 1870s, U.S. manufacturers of high-end machine tools effectively blocked the country’s metric conversion. By that time they were using a measurement system based on the inch and argued that retooling would be prohibitive.

This is new information to me. It was the outcome of 19th century elections and losses by pro-metric candidates that decided the fate of the metric system? I would very much like to see the source of this information or some primary sources upon which it is based. I don’t recall this information appearing in NIST historian Charles F. Treat’s A History of The Metric System Controversy in the US. This assertion would be an interesting new piece to the US non-metric puzzle, but probably not the smoking gun it seems to be offered as. Nineteenth-century pro-metric politician John Shafroth was re-elected and served as a US Representative, Senator, and was Governor of Colorado. In the twentieth century Clayborn Pell served six terms and opened the 1975 metric hearings.

John Bemelmans Marciano is brought in by the Atlantic to testify to the futility of any country adopting metric:

“I can’t overstate how much resistance there’s always been to metric in any country that adopted it,” Marciano said. “In Brazil, it caused a riot that went on for months. In France, it took decades and decades.” Yet, in the U.S., resistance seemed to prevail.

The article does address some actual problems that the US has experienced from its rejection of metric, such as medical dosage errors caused by teaspoon-tablespoon confusion. But the Atlantic once again calls on JBM’s “expertise” and his “extensive research”:

And Mitchell, the science teacher, says she’s witnessed firsthand that measurement bilingualism simply doesn’t work well in the classroom. “I think it’s just very confusing for kids.” She fears measurement confusion contributes to U.S. math and science woes. U.S. students have slid on their global ranking in science and math, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In the most recent ranking, the U.S. was slotted between the Slovak Republic and Lithuania—just behind Russia. Still, there’s no evidence that Americans’ shaky embrace of metric accounts for math and science troubles. And Marciano, who spent three years researching his book, finds Mitchell’s argument preposterous—akin to saying humans can’t master two languages.

The comparison of measurement systems with human languages was the same red herring used by former NIST director Patrick Gallagher. It is the same narrative, the same story, the same myth repeated over and over in the press and by their celebrated persons. Why?—because it offers Americans a comforting truthiness. Clayton continues with another meme:

Why, then—if junior scientists applaud the effort, NIST supports it, and my kids and I had so much fun going metric in the kitchen—has a total switch to metric been such an epic battle with the public?

I have pointed out many times that the history of the metric system in the US seems to have very little to do with the public. The tale of the Metric Populist Uprising of the 1970s is but a comforting mythology. The 1975 Metric Hearings demonstrated that mandatory metrication of the US was never contemplated or enacted—period. Metric reform in the US never dies, it makes an evanescent appearance and then fades away.

The second essay offered up by The Atlantic is called Who’s Afraid of the Metric System? Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia is interviewed about the metric system. Mihm indicates that it was makers of machine tools who thwarted the implementation of metric in the US. Mihm is said to be working on a book titled Mastering Modernity: Weights, Measures, and the Standardization of American Life. Early into the interview this exchange takes place:

Appelbaum: We’ve arrived at a hybrid system. Most American rulers show inches along one edge, centimeters along the other. Is it possible that the metric system will slowly displace English measurements, not by government fiat, but one inch at a time?

Mihm: Yes, that’s right. If history is any guide, government fiats don’t work when it comes to weights and measures. The undertow of history and custom is too strong (proponents of the metric system, for example, are often unaware that it took many decades for France to get its citizens to adopt it—there were many, many setbacks and a staggering amount of resistance).

The article has a quotation “pull out” of the phrase: “Government fiats don’t work when it comes to weights and measures.” in large type for readers just glancing at the essay to propagate the implied, accepted and sanctified cultural message and excuse. It is an embrace of inaction, and is used to justify its continuation. If history is any guide, the metric system is perhaps the most successful scientific idea in the history of technology. Currently, depending on how you count them, there are about 190 countries. Of them 187 have become metric. It is curious that only France is generally discussed and never Australia or New Zealand or dozens and dozens of countries without turmoil. The US introduced metric into the Philippines and it took but seven months.

I would challenge the professor to offer a single example of a nation that became metric using passive government inaction and relying instead on “technical Darwinism.” Australia became metric through legislation and government mandate requiring metric be used. Each industry could choose how they became metric, but metric was mandated. The statement that government fiats don’t work is a meme that is finely tuned for a resonance with a certain American mythology. As I point out in The 1000 Year Wait, it took Hindu-Arabic numerals about 1000 years to be adopted around the world without any government influence. The metric system swept the world in about 150 years with it.

The final exchange in the minute missive confirms another entrenched story about the metric system:

Appelbaum: Chafee’s call for the United States to adopt the metric system generated an immediate backlash. Why does a seemingly dry subject like metrology ignite such intense passions?

Mihm: National pride is at stake. The adoption of another country’s weights and measures—or in the case of the metric system, the rest of the world’s weights and measures—seems an infringement on national sovereignty. That the system in question has a long and distinguished history as a pet project of Francophile, cosmopolitan liberals probably doesn’t help make it appealing to American conservatives.

The implementation of the metric system may have been a “pet project” of France, but the system part of it originated in England. The articles presented in The Atlantic appear to act only to confirm inaccurate metric mythology that comforts status-quo Americans with embellished and fictional tales about the metric system. The metric research done for the Atlantic articles is a Megameter wide and a millimeter deep.

While stories of Archimedes Death, and the strange rites of the Pythagoreans have generated compelling historical myths, they are but the kind of Jackalope tales offered up inside of winter cabins, not for education, but simply for entertainment. The difference is that interlocutors inside of a Montana cabin in the 19th century knew they were spinning tall tales for entertainment and to test audience credulity. Many “historians” of the metric system, and the journalists who interview them, seem unable to realize they have engaged in the same activity, but without the realization they are simply playing telephone.

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.

ssay and wish to support the work of The Metric Maven, please visit his Patreon Page

Metric Parochialism

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Saddle Mountain — Wikimedia Commons

By The Metric Maven

I’ve noted from time to time reader comments that go something like this: “clearly The Metric Maven’s never lived in a metric country, or he would understand the importance of centimeters.” This of course ignores the fact that Pat Naughtin lived in a metric country and was the person who (along with Sven) first brought me to a realization about centimeters and other kludgy uses of the metric system. It also appears to confirm the proverbial idea of the provincial American in the minds of non-Americans.

What was most amusing for me as I read this criticism, was the knowledge that I had, in fact, lived in a metric country as a boy. I had resided in Mexico. The first metric surprise met us as we crossed from Laredo, Texas into Nuevo Laredo Mexico; it was the road signs. They were all in Kilometers. As we headed down the open road with the sun setting in a burned orange pastel sky, the large reflective road signs only told us how many km it was to Monterrey–no miles–no mas. In those days no American car had a speedometer with graduations in Kilometers, only miles. As we were having a family discussion about this, and whether we were currently speeding or not, it was suddenly realized that a second set of small numbers existed on the speedometer of our Volkswagen Beetle. They were graduations in in km/hr. In a microsecond, the small numbers which had gone almost unnoticed for so long became of paramount importance. We had the Rosetta Stone for travel in Mexico, because of the Germans. Had we been in a provincial American car, life would have been much more complicated.

I looked over at the illuminated dial of the speedometer and realized that we were just above 100 Km/hr, so a good guess at an average rate of speed would be about 100. The distance to Monterrey was about 234 Kilometers, which I realized immediately was around 2.3 hours. It really struck me what an amazing coincidence that was–and how simple.

The metric system continued to surprise me now and then in Mexico. The first time we stopped for gas, the amount of gasoline registered on the pump was far more rapid than I expected. I puzzled for a moment, then it hit me. It’s selling us gasoline in liters. One morning a delightful young woman who made my acquaintance at the American school greeted me. I mentioned it had been very hot and seemed even hotter today. She agreed and stated:

“Yes, very hot, I heard it’s going be almost 40 degrees today!”

My mind screeched to a halt. I babbled in astonishment “Forty degrees?”

She restated her assertion “Yes, 40 degrees.” with a bit of impatience with my confusion and a countenance that insinuated I might be a bit dense.

Suddenly the realization hit me: “Oh, oh, you’re talking metric?” With this revelation, I could see the surprise on her face that I seemed clueless about something so prosaic as the weather, melt into recognition. We were now speaking the same measurement language. An American in Mexico would even have a hard time discussing the weather it appeared.

I have a vague memory of a science magazine I bought there, but a clear one that the magazine had a length which it compared with a test tube’s length—in millimeters.

Life in Mexico for the next few months proved interesting. There were many unfamiliar foods like potato chips with chili and lemon or the section a large white plant of some type with seasoning, but one could almost always get a hamburger anywhere. A woman who was helping my mother with our apartment made what she called azucar tortillas or “sugar tortillas.” They were a pre-teen epicurean delight, and an almost perfect complement to a bottle of Coca-Cola. When the time came to leave Mexico, I asked for the recipe. I had a translator friend present to help with the documentation. Then a stumbling block appeared, the cooking was all done in metric and they had no idea how to change it to American measurement. Once again I was foiled by the lack of metric use in the US. That was the last time I ever had azucar tortillas. I looked on the web as I wrote this, and to my astonishment, I found a recipe for Sugar Tortillas. I made a batch and they are exactly as I recall. The irony is not lost on me that the recipe is in Ye Olde English and I had to convert it back to metric.

Metric_Maven_Sugar_Tortillas_Small
Sugar Tortillas — Back from Ye Olde English Oblivion

The strange assumption (in my view) made by commentators who live in other countries is that they have perfected their use of the metric system, and I should submit to their usage. I have instead come to the conclusion that many metric countries could use metric reform. This leads me to a statement by John Bemelmens Marciano (JBM). In his metric challenged book, Whatever Happened to The Metric System, he complains about the complications of metric measures:

I moved to Rome in 2000 and spent most of my time learning Italian. In order to make dinner, I also had to learn to talk metric, as nearly everything in the market is bought by the etto, which is short for ettogrammo, or hectogram. But measures are a lot harder to learn than most foreign vocabulary. Whereas a casa is the same thing as a house and a macchina precisely a car, an etto is about halfway between three ounces and a quarter of a pound. Our standards—feet, pounds, quarts, degrees—are nouns, which we conceive as something concrete. To think of them as anything different takes a serious taxing of the brain. (page 5)

The exclusive use of grams allows one to use integers for everyday values of mass. A hectogram is 100 grams. This is the mass of a hamburger that I make on a regular basis. I go to my meat market and ask for 0.45 pounds and when I get home it’s very close to 200 grams. I measure and make two 100 gram burgers (give or take a couple grams). When one looks at the masses offered in a British supermarket, they are in grams or Kilograms alone. There are no decagrams or hectograms. The British—who are still not completely metric—clearly saw the simplicity of grams with integer values and don’t bother with the prefix cluster around unity. I suspect that because the UK waited so long to become metric, that when they did, the British were more thoughtful about its implementation. Countries like France (1795) and Italy (1861) transitioned without the 20/20 hindsight that Australia would utilize a century or so later. In my essay Familiarity Versus Simplicity we see a 19th century American pro-metric organization pushing for an amazing amount of unit proliferation within the metric system in 1877. I’ve had many discussions about the implementation of the metric system in the US and as we are essentially the last, we should do our best to implement it in the most streamlined fashion possible.

Hector-Grams
Click to enlarge

JBM lived in Italy and found the adjustment to the language easier than coping with their weights and measures. He complains that:

Americans in Europe are constantly being called upon to defend their country against all sorts of attacks. Why do you Americans think you should be different? Why can’t you admit when someone else’s way is better? Europeans find our system of measurement a perfect example of our stubborn stupidity. Why on earth do we insist on keeping such a nonsensical, archaic system of measures when there is another system that makes perfect sense and is used by the entire rest of the world?

In answer to such questions, I at times acted like Wolfe’s “good little colonial,” but I did think that Europeans do certain things better than Americans. In my heart of hearts, however, I never believed that one of them was the metric system.” (page 5-6)

JBM then managed to write an entire book with metric in its title without bothering to learn anything about the metric system. If he had he might have questioned the usage, not the system.

I had an odd encounter a couple of years back at an engineering meeting. The device we were building was to be for a European country. Strangely they used a Canadian company as a supervisory contractor, and I found myself across a table from three engineers who were all from separate European countries. We were going over the specifications and the measured performance of the device when one of the foreign engineers had had about enough. He was tired of seeing inches, foot-pounds and all of the Ye Olde English that permeated the US engineering work. He pointed out that the European country who had funded this project specified it to be exclusively in metric. The other U.S. engineers (working for another company) began an attempt to defend the incredible amount of pigfish introduced into this “metric only” design. The European engineers would have none of it. One began to castigate the US for not converting to the metric system, and the US engineers in particular for fighting it.

The engineers in the room took note that I had remained quiet throughout the brouhaha—which they realized was a bit of an anomaly. The lead European engineer queried me for my thoughts. I took a breath and said (as best as I can recall):

I completely and totally agree with you. The US should have become metric years ago. It is an embarrassment that we have not. If I had my way we would change TOMORROW. However the use of metric by metric countries is often kludgey and poorly implemented. You have several of your specifications in centimeters, this is poor practice. The Australians use millimeters for building construction and never need a decimal point. If we are using millimeters with a decimal point, you know it’s engineering precision. There are many other effective ways to present metric data and specifications that I would be glad to discuss afterward.

One US engineer in the room actually gasped when he heard the Australians build their houses with all metric in millimeters. This was before I found out that the UK also uses millimeters. After one US engineer thought about it he said: “sweet!” The European engineers across from me had a look of surprise and seemed uncertain what to say. The US engineer in charge of all the specifications began removing centimeters with decimal points and changing them all to integer millimeters. Indeed when we needed a decimal point with millimeters, it was for precision parts. I also insisted on changing values like 0.012 millimeters to 12 micrometers. US engineering drawings with metric dimensions are generally in millimeters.

JBM could not offer a statement like mine to the Italians, because he knew nothing about the elegant use of the metric system. After he wrote a book, ostensibly about the metric system, one might expect that he would know enough about it to realize the poor usage he described. It was not like this information was hidden. I was writing my blog at that time. Pat Naughtin’s videos, missives and newsletters were and are on the web. At a certain point, this sort of ignorance by an author who proclaims to know enough about the metric system to author an anti-metric polemic speaks for itself. One can remain provincial even if they have traveled extensively, and be worldly even if they have never ventured outside of their city.

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.

this essay and wish to support the work of The Metric Maven, please visit his Patreon Page