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A review by wescovington
Whatever Happened to the Metric System?: How America Kept Its Feet by John Bemelmans Marciano
4.0
The title of the book is a little misleading as the USA's failure to fully adopt the metric system is only a small part in a wide-ranging story about the desire for some to come up with one unifying standard for everything in the world, including money and language.
The metric system was born out of the Enlightment and put into place during the French Revolution. France's new government loved a standard and rational way of measuring things. And they loved the decimal system. Everything for a while was decimalized, even a calendar that featured 10 day weeks.
Eventually, the system changed into what is used today. It took a while for it to catch on as even France went away from it during Napoleon's time. But, it eventually caught on again, except in two notable places: the United States and Great Britain.
The British weren't about to have a the French tell them just how to measure things. The UK didn't go fully metric until the 1990s when the European Union forced them to. (And they still don't like it.)
Americans never have embraced the metric system. As far back as 1817, John Quincy Adams wrote a report stating that the metric system was more or less a passing fad. There was a push to adopt in the 1970s, but it fell prey to the problem that most changes have in America, i.e., people just don't want to change and learn new things.
Marciano points out that not all parts of customary measures (as the system in the U.S. is referred to) are illogical. Having measurements that can be divided by 2 or 4 or 8 or 3 are very handy.
The idea of a 60-second minute, 60-minute hour, and 24-hour day has probably been the one measurement that the entire world has agreed upon. Even the U.S. and North Korea agree on that.
Will America ever go metric? It sort of already has, even though we still use miles and feet and pounds. Our aircraft use metric measurements. We got to the moon on the metric system. We like buying soda in 2 liter bottles. We read nutrition information to see how many grams of fat are in it.
Technology has made all types of measurement universal. It's all just a matter of doing the math.
The metric system was born out of the Enlightment and put into place during the French Revolution. France's new government loved a standard and rational way of measuring things. And they loved the decimal system. Everything for a while was decimalized, even a calendar that featured 10 day weeks.
Eventually, the system changed into what is used today. It took a while for it to catch on as even France went away from it during Napoleon's time. But, it eventually caught on again, except in two notable places: the United States and Great Britain.
The British weren't about to have a the French tell them just how to measure things. The UK didn't go fully metric until the 1990s when the European Union forced them to. (And they still don't like it.)
Americans never have embraced the metric system. As far back as 1817, John Quincy Adams wrote a report stating that the metric system was more or less a passing fad. There was a push to adopt in the 1970s, but it fell prey to the problem that most changes have in America, i.e., people just don't want to change and learn new things.
Marciano points out that not all parts of customary measures (as the system in the U.S. is referred to) are illogical. Having measurements that can be divided by 2 or 4 or 8 or 3 are very handy.
The idea of a 60-second minute, 60-minute hour, and 24-hour day has probably been the one measurement that the entire world has agreed upon. Even the U.S. and North Korea agree on that.
Will America ever go metric? It sort of already has, even though we still use miles and feet and pounds. Our aircraft use metric measurements. We got to the moon on the metric system. We like buying soda in 2 liter bottles. We read nutrition information to see how many grams of fat are in it.
Technology has made all types of measurement universal. It's all just a matter of doing the math.