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.

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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.