Category Archives: Metric Aversion

Preferred Numbers and the “Preferred Measurement System”

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Charles Renard (1847-1905)

By The Metric Maven

Bulldog Edition

In 1877 the French Engineer Charles Renard was instructed to look into improving captive balloons. These stationary, moored balloons were then in use by the French military, and of great importance. What Renard discovered was that 425 different sizes of cable were being used to moor these balloons. Clearly this large number of cables was not required from the outcome of any Engineering analysis, and were a nightmare to inventory and procure.

Renard determined that for mooring balloons, the most important inherent property of these cables, is their mass per unit length. He was able to develop a mathematical relationship which allowed him to replace the 425 sizes of cable with 17, which covered the same engineering range of requirements.

Renard’s geometric series was a perfect fit for a base 10 decimalized system, as it starts with 10 and ends with 100. The system he had in mind was of course, the metric system. This series produces what are proverbially known in engineering circles as preferred numbers (also called preferred values). Renard’s system was adopted as an international standard, ISO 3, in 1952, and are appropriately referred to as a Renard Series, or R Series. A similar series, the E series, is used to determine the values of electronic resistors, capacitors, inductors and zener diodes.

When metric was introduced into the building industry, a choice of dimensions which could easily be manipulated in one’s head was thought best. Grid lines on drawings are multiples of 100 mm. This is the basic “module” and the center to center of major dimensions are to be multiples of this value denoted as M. Therefore 3M = 300 mm, 6M = 600 mm and 12M = 1200 mm or 1.2 meters. According to Wikipedia:

For example, a multiple of 600 mm (6 M) can always be divided into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 24, 25, 30, etc. parts, each of which is again an integral number of millimetres.

No decimals! Preferred numbers rock! Why don’t we use metric construction like the Australians again?

But not everyone is so enamored with preferred numbers and the metric system. When I was a youthful Engineer working in Aerospace, I was involved in a number of proposals for large projects. I asked, what to my fellow workers, was an incredibly naive question: “Why aren’t we bidding this in metric?” A copy of the provisional bid “boilerplate” was then shown to me. On one of the first few pages of the proposal, was a small section about metric, it read something like: “The dimensions and system of units will be of the inch-pound system. This is necessitated because of the difficulty of procuring metric fasteners in this country, and because many, many more fasteners and hardware exist and are available in inches than in metric.” I began to realize that this “boilerplate” form had been used from time immemorial as a magical talisman to vanquish any thought of using metric in Aerospace. With each new bid, it was copied like junk DNA. I’m certain a similar document is in use in Aerospace to this day, to keep metric at bay.

At that young age I was definitely naive, because I swallowed the assertion, hook, line and imperial sinker. It seemed that limiting fasteners and other hardware might keep one from creating an essential Engineering design. OMG! for want of a nail, the spacecraft might be lost!  Later I would learn from a salesman what this ploy actually was. It was FUD. In case you haven’t heard of it, this is a salesman’s term for what to do if your companies products are clearly inferior to your competitors. You must instill your customer with Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about the alternative product. If you use a competitors electricity, it will burn all your toast! Your soft water will come out hard! X-rays will come out of your light bulbs! The electrons will spill on the floor, and act like tiny ball bearings and you’ll slip! I hope you have health insurance! You better use Brand X electricity, or suffer the consequences!

The other option often employed to keep customers from choosing a competitor, is to create a proliferation of products who’s only purpose is to be non-interchangeable with any other competitors. I have seen this with RF/Microwave connectors. There are hundreds of them and I used to jokingly refer to each new offering as “connector of the week.” Many of them have Olde English screw threads and metric dimensions—but that is another blog. When a product is chosen by a market place “food fight” there is no guarantee that an optimal solution will be the survivor.  If one chooses a product that is not satisfactory, and is incompatible with competitors, a temptation arises to rationalize its use. “It would cost too much to switch over now, this works good enough.”  The person making the purchase does not want the bad choice to reflect on them, and will do their best to make do. Like the non-adoption of metric in the US, inculcated intellectual inertia to continue using a bad design will often prevail over reform.

The introduction of metric is a perfect opportunity (as Pat Naughtin has pointed out) to introduce much needed reform into the different trades. Pat Naughtin offers a number of examples of useful reform in his lectures, which I will not repeat here. The one example which does stand-out as perfectly in sync with the savings one can obtain by using preferred numbers, occurred in Australia. When metric was introduced into an Australian Ford car plant, the number of fasteners used by Ford were reduced by a factor of four after metric conversion. The implementation of metric threads reduced the hodgepodge of bolts by 88% and nuts by 72%. The number of sheet metal thicknesses in some factories were considerably reduced, which saved on inventory costs, and had no impact on Engineering design options. According to  Kevin Wilks in his book Metrication in Australia (thanks Klystron): When standardizing containers, Australia was able to reduce the number of can sizes, for packing goods sold by mass, from approximately 90 to 30. He goes on:

Another example in wholesale packaging concerned corrugated fiberboard cases for packing fruit. With the establishment of metric packing quantities the opportunity was taken to reduce the variety of shapes and sizes from many hundreds to about 50.

The use of preferred numbers with the metric system is good for business, despite protestations to the contrary. The metric system’s absence in the US requires consumers to pay an unseen externality penalty. Business can ignore metrication because the citizens of the US pick up the tab, but don’t realize it. This unseen cost to consumers exists because of an inefficient measurement system, which powerful segments of the business lobby in the US, have perennially refused to allow government to legislate out of existence, since at least 1921. The cost of extra waste and inefficiency is just passed on to the consumer.

These costs also make American industry more expensive when compared with overseas companies. We need mandatory metrication, and we need it now to reform America, and make it competitive in the 21st Century—before the 22nd arrives.

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 not of direct importance to metric education. It 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.

Orwell and The Metric System

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George Orwell (1903-1950)

By The Metric Maven

Bulldog Edition

As I wandered the halls of my Junior High as a boy, I saw two books over and over. One was George Orwell’s 1984 and the other was his book Animal Farm. They were required reading for an English class. One I was never in.  I did not read either book until a few years back when I read 1984. When I did, I was surprised at the anti-metric viewpoint Orwell articulated. Christopher Hitchens in his book Why Orwell Matters states on page 128:

“And he had a strong conviction that the metric system — which was to become such a toxic issue in England in the early years of this millennium — was somehow ill-suited to humans, let alone Englishmen.”

He conceded that for industrial and scientific purposes the metric scheme was necessary. However:

“The metric system does not possess, or had not succeeded in establishing, a large number of units that can be visualized. There is, for instance, effectively no unit between the metre, which is more than a yard, and the centimeter, which is less than half an inch. In English your can describe someone as being five feet three inches high….but I have never heard a Frenchman say, ‘He is a hundred and forty-two centimeters high’; it would not convey any visual image.” (page 128-129)

Hitchens discusses Orwell’s literary objections that consist of the the fact that measurements such as the pint, quart, foot and so on are much shorter to pronounce than liter, meter and such. It is the same complains I heard when reading objections offered in the 19th century by “defenders of Anglo-Saxon measures.” Hitchens then states:

“…he [Orwell] was protesting to his agent that the American publishers of Nineteen Eighty-Four had, at the proof stage, rendered all his metric measurements into the old form: ‘The use of the metric system was part of the buildup and I don’t want it changed if avoidable.” It’s easy to see why. When Winston Smith goes slumming with the proles in Chapter Eight, he gets into a futile conversation with an addled old man whose memory — so crucial to Winston — is a wreck except for unimportant details:

“I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ‘ole bleeding boozer?’

‘And waht in hell’s name is a pint?’ said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the container.

‘ ‘Ark at ‘im. Call ‘isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ‘alf of a quart and there’s four quarts to the gallon. “Ave to tach you the A, B, C, next.”

‘Never ‘eard of ’em,’ the barman said shortly. “Litre and half litre — that’s all we serve.’

Hitchens states: “..Orwell succeeds in depicting a sodden deracinated people who have been forcibly alienated from the familiar things that were near and dear to them.”

I have heard Hitchens relate that he was puzzled by Orwell’s skepticism toward the metric system. That in turn, surprised me. When I first ran across Orwell’s anti-metric position, It struck me as a common problem that many scholars encounter, and to which they are blind. This is the problem where their thesis for a particular circumstance is applied outside of the environment in which it makes sense. James Frazer, author of the Golden Bough, saw magic everywhere, and could not help but stretch the bounds of his thesis to the point where one might see the whole of humanity acting in response to magical impulses. Richard Dawkins and his idea of Selfish Genes controlling humanity is another. Or Population Geneticist George Price, who became consumed by the idea that we are all evolutionary automatons.

What was the thesis of Orwells’ that acted like a literary version of The Blob, and finally oozed over the metric system?  It is the idea that the control of language was the weapon used by Big Brother to enslave the population. Big Brother was slowly eliminating words that could express complicated human emotions and societal ideas. Big Brother was distilling the dictionary down from a massive tome, to a pamphlet. The purpose of this was to make the public less and less articulate, and unable to express themselves. This was the means by which he would reduce humanity to a useful primate, somewhere just above a chimpanzee using sign language, but much more pliable for enslavement. Orwell seems to simply apply  his thesis to measurement units. If a group is trying to eliminate numerous measurement units, then it’s the same activity, with the same sinister purpose as was done with literature. He equates literature with scientific measurement. Now that’s serious pigfish.  More measurement units good, less measurement units bad. Orwell’s thinking–flawed.

In my view, Orwell is also a good example of what C.P. Snow famously called “The Two Cultures.” Snow saw two groups, which can be broadly called literary intellectuals and scientific intellectuals, existing with a deep intellectual chasm between them. Orwell is clearly in the literary camp, and appears to be almost scientifically illiterate. Whereas society may have a fractal nature, the mass of a ball bearing does not; it has one value. The idea that assigning a multitude of unequal units to describe a ball bearing’s mass, will in turn, increase one’s understanding of the value of its mass, is anathema to a common understanding of the quantity. Engineering and Science rely on consistent and universal measurement to function. Without measurement consensus, scientific endeavors would grind to a halt as no one could repeat experiments.

If I had the opportunity, I would have given Mr. Orwell a bit of homework that just might have changed his view about metric. I would have had him read John Quincy Adams Report on Measures. It is clear to anyone reading it (except for its author, which is very odd) that the almost uncountable number of units he quotes produce nothing but confusion, and do not lead to clarity. Here is part of ONE page from the voluminous report:

Click To Enlarge

Earlier John Quincy Adams relates how the French attempted to retain measurement names even as they had simplified the quantities by using grams.

I have used grams in my cooking for about two years now, and I can tell you, grams mean something to me, other quantities are just opaque obfuscation. Orwell’s unfamiliarity with Engineering and Science, and his strange belief that there should be one simple, logical and intuitive measurement system for Engineers and Scientists and a complete non-intuitive free-for-all of units and sizes for the “common person” seems contrary to his stated interests. The one place where reality intrudes and shows no quarter is in measurement. If you cannot be certain how much of a commodity you are purchasing, then you may end up starving. Deliberate confusions of measurement quantities, and unit proliferation, are perhaps the oldest methods employed to cheat one’s fellow person. So would you like to purchase to gold by the pound and sell it by the pound at the same price, when in one case it’s Troy and the other it’s Avoirdupois? Given the choice between this option and in both cases measuring the mass in grams which would you choose?

Mr Orwell did not do humanity a favor by embracing, manifesting and promoting his idea of “Englishness” through measurement confusion. He has hurt Britain, and his influence on thinking in the US has certainly made matters worse. Even worse, he has created an “intellectual refuge for scoundrels,” mantled within anti-authoritarian literature. James Joyce is respected as a literary beacon, but I suspect he would write useless books on plumbing. Orwell may have exceptional and important observations about human society, but is obviously feckless when it comes to understanding quantitative measurement.

Believe me, Big Brother would have loved the imperial system, and those struggling against him would have spoken in soft whispers about metric measurements. The only words that would have been added to Big Brothers dictionary would have been perches, pottles, casks, firkins, and hogsheads ad nausium. Big Brother will determine the dimensions of the world, and with a proliferation of units, change it at will. But Orwell leaves us with a very slight puzzle about his view of the metric system, In his essay England Your England, he also said this:

One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to  the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency.

In the context of this essay, which appears to have been written as a semi-patriotic paean of praise for England as the Nazis rained bombs upon his nation, I think he might be using this statement to tap into some type of “English Pride,” in the same manner that I hear some ignorant Americans gleefully express the belief that our Olde English Measurements are what make us “unique” and “exceptional.” I’m not certain if Orwell’s statement on weights and measures is a condemnation, or a dog-whistle statement to the British, which is meant to endear them to themselves. Either way, George Orwell did not understand that a measurement system is not the same as a vocabulary. A vocabulary maps words with the infinite variety of human emotions and metaphor. A measurement system maps numbers to a single reality in nature. The reduction of vocabulary reduces the ability of a population to express itself socially. The proliferation of measurement units decreases the ability of a population to describe the physical world in a coherent manner. The metric system was created in response to exactly this problem. The physical world is not the same as the emotional world. Mr Orwell dealt with the latter, but clearly had little understanding of the former, or he would have embraced the metric system.

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 not of direct importance to metric education. It 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.