Category Archives: Metric History

The Lone Star Country

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By The Metric Maven

Bulldog Edition

In my second anniversary blog I made a short statement about why I thought Liberia had not adopted the metric system. I did not think it would be controversial in any way, but to my surprise some non-US residents of the world seemed to take issue with my summation:

Liberia: settled by expatriate former slaves from the US. Many Liberians apparently still think of themselves as tied to America, so it’s not shocking they are also not metric.

Liberia, has always been a curiosity for me. It first entered my consciousness somewhere about 1970 or so. I watched a report on CBS (I think it was 60 minutes) about Liberia. It was mind boggling. The town they showed (I assume it was Monrovia) looked like my own hometown. The houses looked the same, the mail boxes looked the same, the postal uniforms were the same, people spoke English, but everyone was black. It made quite an impact on me. Liberia would later become known as the place for U.S. ships to register to avoid U.S. safety regulation. In the 1980s I was saddened to hear about the civil war there.  After that, I really didn’t know what happened. Perhaps the people from outside the US knew something I didn’t?  Had Liberia changed so much that I could not make the assumption they still related as Americans?

I looked for a current history of Liberia, and was rewarded when I found Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It, by James Ciment. It was published in 2013. The future Liberians arrived in Africa on what the author called The Black Mayflower. The name of the ship was The Elizabeth. In a document, apparently lost to history, there was a version of a Mayflower Compact. When they arrived, Ciment states: “[Lott] Carey was one of the first colonists to recognize that the colonists, soon to be Liberians, were a tiny and largely friendless people in a big and hostile land.” The local Africans referred to the colonists as “Black White men.” These men would create a Declaration of Independence which began “We, the people of the Republic of Liberia were originally the inhabitants of the United States of North America.” They wrote a Constitution which largely ignored the local population, and elected their first President. The capital, Monrovia, is the only one named for the elected leader of another country.

Liberians would later lose a considerable amount of their territory to British and French ambitions. As they saw the US as harboring no designs on territory in Africa, America would often become the trusted broker in disputes. At one point Buffalo Soldiers from the US were dispatched to Liberia as part of a loan guaranteed by the American government. This caused some stress between the Liberians and the US.

By World War I the Liberians had begun to look toward Europe, and Germany in particular, for trade. Ciment relates:  “But when the United States entered the war in April 1917, it pressured Monrovia to sever ties with Berlin, which, by the early twentieth century, had become the country’s leading trade partner. President King felt that his nation was owed something for this act of loyalty.” Unfortunately, the US did not compensate Liberia for doing so.

In 1924 Harvey Firestone, decided Liberia would be a great place to get rubber. Firestone pushed through a deal in which: “Liberia would remain a virtually wholly owned subsidiary of Harvey Firestone until its economic expansion after World War II….”

Liberia had been founded to do missionary work in Africa, and so almost all its schools were seminary schools where “They learned little that was modern or practical—little that might prove useful in business and industry—a constant complaint of domestic and foreign pedagogical reformers then and since.” What they did produce in excess were Lawyers.

After World War II the Liberians continued to be diplomatically close to the US:

The Barclay administration, ever suspicious of white outsiders, put up obstacle after obstacle to a potential deal. “I am of the opinion … that only an American enterprise will succeed, as only they can recon with the collaboration of the Liberian authorities.”

Indeed this proved to be true, and cash began to flow into Liberia in the 1950s and 1960s. There was an improvement in the everyday lives of some Liberians:

…but Monrovia’s well-connected “big-men” benefited as well, While they were chauffeured in American sedans to desk jobs at foreign subsidiaries, their wives cruised the aisles at the White Rose Supermarket, lured by advertisements boasting “a fresh supply  of goods from the U.S.”

Unfortunately the well-off had grown rich, but the poor remained poor. This would precipitate stress in Liberian society. The tight connection with the US continued in this period. Ciment indicates that  “….in Liberia, having been “abroad” always meant having been to America, and was a coveted status marker….”

In 1980 there was a coup. It ended the 133 year rule of the Americo-Liberian elite. What happened during this time is still uncertain and clouded in mystery. Even basic information is not known about the principals involved, and who did what. When the coup did occur, the Americo-Liberian elite who could, fled the country. Many ended up in Virgina, Maryland and New York. The Liberian civil war and its aftermath were horrific, and only in recent years has any semblance of stability reestablished itself.

In my view, Liberia has remained very much the Lone Star Country. The talk of becoming metric in the US ended in 1980 with the disbanding of the Metric Board by Ronald Reagan. Liberia was and is culturally tied to the US, and so, if the US was never to become metric, it would make sense that Liberia saw no reason to change.

But what do Liberians think of the US currently?  In his preface James Ciment offers these observations:

I was greeted warmly. Having never been the subjects of Western imperialists, Liberians evince little animus toward white people. They also genuinely like Americans. In the interviews, I sensed that many felt we were practically kin, although the sentiment always seemed tinged with disappointment.

and:

The kinship contemporary Liberians of all backgrounds felt with Americans had deeper and more meaningful roots than I—and perhaps even my interviewees—had ever imagined.

James Ciment’s book, Another America, does not mention the metric system. I spoke by phone with James Ciment on 2014-03-25. The question as to why Liberia has remained non-metric had not occurred to him. He stated that the maps he had when he visited Liberia were old, but as he recalled they were in miles. Liberia’s neighbors are all metric. I asked him if it was because the Liberians see themselves as Americans, and in solidarity retained Ye Olde English measures. Ciment’s answer was short and simple: “Yes.”  He added that another aspect is the political and legislative inertia there. Ciment indicated there is not a lot of signage in Liberia these days.

Climent verified that in the 1960s Liberia was richer and better off than its  neighbors. When I related my recollection of a 60 minutes story about Liberia and how everything looked like the small town from which I came, he confirmed it. Back in the 1960s-1970s it looked like the US. There are still houses in Liberia that look like they have been transported from Alabama to Africa.

The measurement system used in Liberia was transported from America to Liberia as well. It remains there, in the Lone Star Country, probably waiting for the United States to become metric—if it ever does.

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.

A Metric England?

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By The Metric Maven

As it became increasingly clear in the early 1980s that the US would not become metric, a professor of mine stated  “England doesn’t even use the English system—they’ve gone metric.” Of course, I had no idea. I’ve never been to the UK. I assumed that Britain had gone metric because the rest of the world had at that time. Then lingering doubt began to creep into my mind as the decades passed, and I began to believe that Britain had not become metric. It appeared that beer was still sold in pints, and the roads were all in miles. I vaguely heard about the “metric martyrs” and the EU throwing its hands in the air and finally giving up on metric only labeling from the UK. The BBC science programs I watched seemed to have a lot of “English” units, at least I seldom noticed metric ones (although I believe I see more used now).

Like most Americans, I figured they had done the same thing  as we in the US, they offered lip service during the world wide metric conversion, and then sat back, and never changed anything. All I had to do was look North to Canada for an example of a country which still has the Queen on its money, has the roadways all in metric, but almost everything else from cooking to housing construction appears to be in inches, feet and so on. Why would I believe that Great Britain, which had pints and miles everywhere, was metric. I really didn’t think about it much as I have enough problems dealing with the immovable and incorrigible metric object known as the USA. Worse yet, I’d read almost a century of authorities in the UK claiming the UK would become metric when the US did. I would then read US authorities over the same period claiming that we would become metric when the UK did.

Derek Pollard of the UK Metric Association could not help but notice that I saw Australia as an English speaking metric country, but not Great Britain. He took exception with this view and sent proof that UK construction is in metric, which clearly it is. Still, there is that nagging feeling that metric penetration into British society was a millimeter deep. Sure, construction of UK roads is in meters, but then they mark them in miles. Sure houses may be constructed in metric, but the streets are all marked in non-metric units. Beer may come from Belgium, but they sell it in pints. The US, of course, does neither, it’s all Ye Olde English, and when it’s metric, it is immediately converted to Ye Olde English and hidden away.

Derek must have continued to sense this leftover minor metric skepticism, because it seems to have finally caused him to send me iron clad, and unquestionable proof that the everyday UK of Andy Capp is almost entirely metric. Did Derek get an official letter that certified the UK is metric, have it signed by the Prime Minister, and then notarized by the Queen? No, he send me documents which have far more authority than that. He sent me some of his “junk mail.” He sent me a small paper flyer from a place called Morrisons:

British Beef Meatballs, British Diced Chicken Breasts, British Lamb chops all sold pre-packaged in grams! Meadow Park milk is shown sold in 2 litre plastic containers—not a pottle—that.

Included in Derek’s letter is a 32 page flyer from B&Q Warehouse which looks like a UK version of Home Depot–but, from a measurement perspective, that’s where the similarity ends. Want to purchase a door for your house?  Well look no further than B&Q for doors specified in millimetres:

Unfortunately,  as Derek points out, the strange numbers (1981 x 762 mm) show that they are probably converted from non-metric sizes as they are not not nice round integers. This is a hinderance to thinking metric when building, and realizing its maximum benefit.

There is paint sold in 2.5 liter cans, others just tell you the price per litre. There are 333 x 333 mm porcelain floor tiles. Ice melt is sold in 2 kg bags. Wild Bird seed in 12.75 kg bags—the British must feed their birds well. Everywhere one looks in these junk mail flyers, there is an almost complete absence of anything non-metric. There are no side by side sizes, one in metric and the other in Imperial—it’s all metric! Very simple. I did find my nemesis, the centimeter, but only in one tiny section for door mats:

Centimeters — Appropriately Treated Like A Door Mat (click to enlarge)

Indeed, that centimeters would be used for door mats, and they were only a pound each, actually made sense—metaphorically. The other centibad was found in the Morrison’s food flyer. But this may not be the fault of the British merchants—it looks to be the fault of the French! A seventy five centilitre bottle of wine! Here is one of the few times I can thumb my nose and say I want a proper, American, 750 mL bottle of wine–you know a fifth. For the first time ever, I can feel sanctimonious.

French Wine with questionable metric usage

The French are not the people with whom you should discuss how to most effectively use the metric system. Their use has pre-metric vestiges of the prefix cluster around unity.

Derek pointed out that a radiator is rated in BTU’s on one page, and on the other they have one which is 2kw, which should be 2 kW of course—but my heavens, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything with kW on it in the US like this. I’m baffled by the fact that the flyers often don’t have spaces between the numbers and units, as evidenced below:

BTU?—perhaps that’s why it’s on sale?

When I look at these flyers, it makes me rather envious, and think that if the US was this metric, I would just stop blogging and go outside to play. It then struck me just how frustrating it must be to have metric all around, but not on the roads, or in the pubs. It would be a constant non-metric reminder one would see everyday when they left their residence. It would also seem more and more absurd as time goes by. I’m extremely envious of Derek’s junk mail, but it’s clear the UKMA has plenty of non-metric fires to deal with before Britain becomes completely metric. Here in the US?—well, my junk mail is metricless.

Postscript:

My friend Pierre keeps me informed on all matters culinary with an emphasis on metric versus Olde English. He sent me a graphic of a deep fryer with this comment:

Commercial fryers, like what McDonalds uses to make french fries are sold by volume. Like, there are bigger and smaller capacity ones.

Can you guess what unit of measurement one might use to specify them?

They are sold by the pound. That’s right. They are sold by how many pounds of oil they hold. This is a 14lb unit, which I’m sure you knew already by looking at it.

So, next time you are in Safeway …. , pick up a pound of frying oil for me, wouldja?

Here is a link to the fryer about which Pierre so eloquently opines. But there’s more! Pierre also checked out oils he might like me to supply for him, should I feel that generous, and indeed you can note that one will purchase a 35 lb box of oil, and not one using Olde English volume measures:

And just in case you think the labeling has liters on it. Here is a close-up of the bottom label:

So, should any of our friends from the UK decide they want home-made fish and chips on a visit to the U.S., and want to do it themselves, you now know the proper US units to use when using a fryer here.

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.