Category Archives: Metric Reform

An Open Letter Response To: “Supporting American Choices on Measurement”

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Dr. Patrick Gallagher — Director of NIST

Dear Dr. Gallagher:

This open letter is in response to your email/post entitled Supporting American Choices on Measurement which you composed in response to a We The People petition, which calls for making the metric system (that is, SI) the exclusive measurement system of the United States. In brief, what you offer is not a substantive response to a reasonable petition for action on an increasingly urgent issue, but only condescension and airy rationalization for perpetuating our current bureaucratic stasis.

First, the metric system, is a system. The random collection of measures used in the US is not a system. They are neither equivalent nor comparable. I am disturbed that the head of NIST can speak of the metric system, and our potpourri of units, as even remotely comparable in either intellectual stature or technical merit. But far more important, the very thesis of Supporting American Choices on Measurement is false on the face of it, as there is no actual opportunity for a metric option in this nation. In my postings on metric, I have written about The Invisible Metric Embargo in the US, which does not allow me to purchase metric tools—despite my desires as a consumer. One simply cannot readily purchase metric-only, mm-only, tape measures, and other tools in the US. I’ve had to obtain mine from Australia to use in my Engineering Practice. They are the same tools that are used in metric building construction, which the US government has quietly abandoned after the 1990s. Metric construction saves 10-15% when compared with our non-system. The Australians have been reaping these metric rewards for over thirty years. I have detailed this in Building a Metric Shed. Over the counter medicines are allowed by your “freedom of choice” to offer only teaspoons and tablespoons. Feral Units Endanger Our Health details the teaspoon/tablespoon, gram/grain misdosage problem, which has been acknowledged by the medical community since at least 1902. Mandatory dosage cups in milliliters have been eschewed by industry for years, to the detriment of public health and justified, probably for the most part, by the need for “freedom of choice.”

I may have the choice to set my GPS to meters and kilometers, but I don’t have the choice to press a button within my car and change the road signs to meters and kilometers. The choice of only miles and feet (in vulgar fractions no less) on US road signs was decided by filibuster, in 1978, by Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa. The details of how this mandatory requirement for miles and feet on US road signs came about, may be found in A Tale of Two Iowans. What channel do I watch to see a metric only, or even a metric any weather broadcast in the US? Metric measures in weather broadcasts also ended in the late 1970s. I would like to see snow and rain totals in millimeters, but I do not have that choice.

The public teachers of the 1970s began to teach metric, but quickly realized that the US was to be the only country (other than Liberia and Myanmar) which had a government that would not institute a true metric conversion. The teachers were left without a measurement ecosystem outside of their classroom to which they could teach, and so metric instruction was “all dressed up with nowhere to go.” Metric instruction has become perfunctory.

If we actually had the completely open, voluntary system about which you sing peons of praise, then why is there any restriction on manufacturers to include labeling other than metric at this moment? And why do you have to work “to make it possible” for metric only labeling? If it is not allowed right now, then metric only is obviously not a voluntary choice for industry. The non-system of the US is mandatory.  It does not support your thesis that everyone has a choice.

That measurement units need “context” for meaning, and are chosen depending upon the given circumstances is nonsensical. Why not just create a new measurement unit for each circumstance—like medieval cultures did? The non-system we use in the US, measures feet in barleycorns (three barleycorns in an inch you know), to determine shoe size, instead of millimeters. What possible context makes the measurement of human feet require barleycorns as a unit? Perhaps a foot should be measured in feet? That seems like a logical context. My essay Brannock and Barleycorns might help you with context when considering this question.

You cite examples of multiple units which are in use and describe the same quantity as something wondrous which we should lionize. This is not an advantage, it is a problem called unit proliferation. In the US, people who work with tools have to needlessly purchase both metric and inch tools. This doubles the infrastructure cost for working Americans. It is also a large drag on our economy. Weights and measures is The Invisible Infrastructure of a nation. Ours is in complete decay, yet you celebrate this fact.

There is no “seamless transition” between metric and our non-system. Dual units only encourage unnecessary opportunities for mistakes. Metric minimizes them. The DART and Mars Climate Orbiter mission failures which occurred because of the “choice” to use multiple measurement units, are examples which should not be swept under the rug with charming prose, like “seamless transition.”

Incidentally, your statement that the metric system is universal in science and industry is also demonstrably false. I grant you that it should be, but I know from personal experience that the US aerospace industry is currently hamstrung by something called the mil. A mil is one thousandth of an inch. Now, you might suppose that this would be an ideal time for a metric conversion in US aerospace: after all, with the long-overdue retirement of the Space Shuttle, the United States has no astronaut-capable space vehicle. But the contract for Orion, the manned vehicle intended to replace the Shuttle, was awarded to Lockheed Martin, at least in part, on the understanding that all engineering would be submitted in thousandths of an inch.

Dr. Gallagher, your response has shown that, as I predicted, this petition would be a feckless exercise in futility, and of no lobbying value. The public is viewed not as We The People, but They The Powerless. Your response demonstrates an apparent technical ignorance about the metric system. It makes you appear to have not even a basic understanding of how the measurement system that powers engineering and science around the world is used, and it’s massive advantages for society as a whole.  I would think It should be obvious to a Director of NIST, that a measurement system and a spoken language are two completely different intellectual constructs. Especially a Director with a background in physics and philosophy. My essay Orwell and The Metric System might be instructive if you are unclear on this point.

To compare the measurement situation we face in the US to bilingual education is mendacious. Your whitewash of the history of how the current non-system of measurements were finally defined in terms of metric standards, hides the fact there was no other technical choice. There was no alternative. Without using the metric standards supplied from our signing of the Treaty of the Meter, science and industry in this nation could have ground to a halt. T.C. Mendehall had no choice but to announce that metric standards would be used to define our farrago of units. This is because of government inaction on mandating metrication, and the fact that no alternative measurement standards existed for our non-system. The Constitution tasks Congress with fixing the weights and measures of the US, which they have neglected with vigor from the founding of the republic.

As Director of NIST, I cannot comprehend how you could assert there is no weights and measurements problem in the US whatsoever, and everything is just hunky-dory. This is clearly not the case. I have written forty-six essays over the last year or so detailing how our lack of exclusive metrication, costs us money, endangers our health and decreases our industrial competitiveness. The late Pat Naughtin left a classic Google video lecture, and a mountain of information on how damaging it is for the US not to have metric. How can you have apparently not investigated any of it?—and included it in your response? The information is freely available. I can only ask with exasperation why are you not promoting the metric system?—why are you not engaged in the carrying out the task for which the public has employed you?–to promote standards. The metric system is the standard of ninety-five percent of the worlds population. Why are you not promoting this standard with the sense of urgency that it deserves?

Your choice to issue Supporting American Choices on Measurement late on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend is as transparently cynical as is your response. The timing is calculated to minimize or eliminate any press coverage with three days of distraction. In doing this you are blatantly, and apparently willfully, ignoring the 25,000 49,914 American citizens who signed the petition for the US to adopt the metric system. Because of your callous and dismissive treatment of an earnest request made by these citizens for the implementation of the metric system, this only leads to a justified belief that our public servants have no interest in serving the public, or the public interest.

Respectfully,

The Metric Maven
US Citizen and Professional Engineer

P.S. To my (at this point, fairly) long time readers, I would like to state that my next regularly scheduled blog on 2013-05-30, was written, and scheduled, long before Dr. Gallagher issued his response to the metric petition. When you read my upcoming blog, you will see the same manner of argument as Dr Gallagher’s has been offered for almost a century. Dr. Gallagher only parrots the antique prose in a contemporary fashion.

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.

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.