Category Archives: Metric Aversion

My Measurements Can Beat Up Your Measurement System

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By The Metric Maven

Bulldog Edition

One day while discussing architecture and engineering with Sven, the subject gravitated to Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923), and his iconic tower in Paris. Sven pointed out that The Eiffel Tower is generally called by that name here in the US, but elsewhere was originally known as the 300 Meter Tower. I had no idea. The tower itself was so reviled by the art establishment of the time in Paris that they created “The Committee of Three Hundred,” which symbolically had one member for each meter of the egregious tower’s height. Like any good committee they created a petition which asserted (Wikipedia):

“We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection…of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower … To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years…we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal”

One had no trouble detecting their displeasure at this creation. It is strangely ironic that the tower had not yet been constructed, and so the artists were all judging from drawings. Eiffel responded by comparing his work with that of the Egyptian pyramids. There was more irony to be found with other people who did more than compare their ideas to the pyramid, but asserted it was the basis for a sacred measure. Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900) was not one to settle for mere similarity. He traveled to Egypt and took measurements of the pyramid, from which he derived the pyramid inch. The pyramid also allowed for the derivation of the pyramid pint and a pyramid temperature scale. The pyramid inch was in C.P. Smyth’s view handed down to us by God himself. The introduction of the metric system in to Britain would therefore be unthinkable. C.P. Smyth continued his anti-metric activities throughout much of his life. He was also one of the Vice Presidents of the International Institute for Preserving and Perfecting Anglo-Saxon Weights and Measures.

The President of this organization was American engineer Charles Latimer (1827-1888). He also had a problem with Gustave Eiffel, and did not like one of his creations: The Statue of Liberty. In a bimonthly publication called the International Standard  they state: “There is only one thing we do not like about the statue: We prefer a statue of liberty measured in good earth-commensurable Anglo-Saxon inches, not in French millimeters, the result of caprice…” This statement was quoted in part five of the newspaper series Everyday Guide to the Metric System published in the late 1970s.

Eiffel’s works were criticized using the metric system in France (The Committee of Three Hundred) and in the US because they were built with the metric system. The more things change the more they remain the same. The World Trade Center twin towers were described by Norman Mailer as two fangs rising up into the New York skyline. They did not fit, he argued, within the wondrous architecture and beautiful skyline which surrounded them. They were a blight on Manhattan. Building One had an antenna which protruded 526 meters from the ground, and building two was 415 meters in height. Very long fangs indeed. The criticisms of the past were long forgotten following September 11, 2001 when they were both destroyed by terrorists.

One World Trade Center — Wikipedia Commons

The discussion of a replacement for the World Trade Center buildings has been politically heated, and took considerable time to begin. The replacement is called One World Trade Center and is scheduled to open in 2014. I was chagrined when I found out its architectural height is 1776 feet. It was like the Eiffel Tower (excuse me the 300 meter tower) and The Statue of Liberty all over again. Measurement units tied to cultural identity, which enforce cultural intransigence concerning the metric system. Denver cannot help being The Mile High City (it was originally the Queen City), nor Colorado being The Kilometer High State, but we could have chosen a different architectural manner to express our “Americaness” other than something as anachronistic as a height in feet, tied to a year associated with the birth of the US. We had a choice, and once again we chose to memorialize the past with anachronistic measure. Will we ever again choose the future?

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.

For Shoes, It’s The Metric 1960s

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By The Metric Maven

Bulldog Edition

In response to the We The People Petition to make the metric system the exclusive system of measurement in the US, the now former director of NIST, David Gallagher indicated that it is his policy on measurement to just “do your own thing.”  Standards are just so restrictive for the (former) director of NIST. One of the catch phrases of 1960s America was to “do your own thing.”  While in some contexts this may be admirable, when it comes to creating a consistent measuring of the world, it is generally not.

When I wrote my essay Brannock and Barleycorns, I thought it would be the last essay I would ever write on shoe size, after all there is a metric international standard called mondopoint, and there it is—for all to use.  Unless of course you live in the US and feel constrained and oppressed by logical “establishment standards.” Just as a quick review, mondopoint is a standard which uses the length of a human foot in millimeters as a  size designation.  According to Wikipedia:

The International Standard is ISO 9407:1991, “Shoe sizes—Mondopoint system of sizing and marking”,[2] which recommends a shoe-size system known as Mondopoint.

It is based on the mean foot length and width for which the shoe is suitable, measured in millimetres. A shoe size of 280/110 indicates a mean foot length of 280 millimetres (11 in) and width of 110 millimetres (4.3 in).

Because Mondopoint also takes the foot width into account, it allows for better fitting than most other systems. It is, therefore, used by NATO and other military services. Mondopoint is also used for ski boots.

I’ve never snow skied more than once, so I don’t normally look into the size of ski boots. One day I was corresponding with Peter Goodyear in Australia by email and mentioned that I had heard we use mondopoint for ski boots, so perhaps there is some hope in the next century or two to get this sizing of shoes introduced more generally. Here is what you find if you look at an Australian website for mondopoint:

There it is, nice integer shoe size numbers in millimeters as mondopoint was designed to produce, and as nature intended. All was well with the world until I began looking at US websites for ski boots. The first one has this:

Yes, the US “do your own thing,” measurement spirit invaded the mondopoint standard. The international standard, which is in millimeters, had been unilaterally changed to centimeters by US ski boot vendors. We must have numbers which are like inches, (i.e. pseudo-inches), and insert decimal points or we just feel too constrained by the unfamiliar. I’m sure NIST would approve of this, if they aren’t concerned their act of approval of anything metric might be too constraining and make people feel uptight. When wearing ski boots one doesn’t want to have a bad trip.

One US website feels overly-constrained to even be bothered with units. They boldly use centimeters without bothering to tell us they are now two steps away from the mondopoint standard:

One website even has a history of mondopoint for us to read. It is most enlightening:

So, mondopoint was developed by ski boot manufacturers?—as a universal measurement for ski boots and is designated in centimeters?  That’s not what the international standard indicates, as I understand it. Perhaps this is a Hollywood version of metric history. You know, like U-571, where it was the British that captured an enigma machine in WWII in reality, but we’ll just change it so that  the US did it instead for the movie version. Who would know the difference? Thank heavens the UK has become mostly metric. I’m sure I can trust them to get history—what?–wait—what’s this?:

No! not centimeters again! e tu UK? Then I run across a UK online ski forum with this question: “Can a Mondo Point 28 be marked as 328 mm?” Well, talk about a shoe on the wrong foot.

Why is it the only people who take metric seriously, and also speak English, appear to be the Australians. Is it because they are so far away from our bad influence? I believe much of the problem is that in the US, millimeter-only metric rulers are almost non-existent, and the desire for a pseudo-inch is so attractive, that we cannot think outside the centimeter. Without the extraneous comfort of an unnecessary decimal point or fraction to contemplate, we break out in a sweat considering the possibility that actual change might be encountered. Perhaps the biggest problem in the US when it concerns measurement, might be that we simply don’t view innumeracy as a serious personal deficiency, and perversely seem to celebrate this inability to understand magnitudes. The confusion of a factor of ten can really mess up a dimension. Perhaps this explains the origin of platform shoes?

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.