The Metric System - Bah!

Calpundit has a post about the metric system and how its base units were arrived at. We've long held that the metric system has serious problems - but not for the reasons you might suspect. We wrote about it four years ago - before the days of weblogs. Here is that commentary:

What's wrong with the metric system.

While the historical trend is certainly in the direction of complete acceptance of the metric system, it still has grave defects. There are two main problems: ungainly terminology, and a poor choice of initial values. The system was introduced in 1799 in the wake of the French Revolution. It was probably part of the reaction against the old society as well as being in the spirit of 'reason', which was all part of the phenomenon known as the Age of Enlightenment. Science was finally emerging and showing it to be quite a contender as a system of thought. The impact of Newton's success in physics (in the early 1700's) on the general outlook was tremendous. The power and potential of rational thought freed men to re-inspect the world about them. As a result there was a tendency to start afresh, and construct a new politics and society without reference to tradition. The metric system was a part of that.

The problem with the metric system was that reason was allowed to trump everything else. 'Reason' became its own standard. Take the case of the meter. It was determined initially as 1/10,000,000 the distance between the pole and the equator. So what? Here we have a fetish being made over round numbers. And who cares about the distance between two locations on a particular planet? Maybe it was felt that by basing the measurement on our earth, the system would have universal appeal, as well as sort of ethical neutrality. But it was still silly to go about it that way. The standard length should have been something closer to an inch.

TERMINOLOGY:
If you like polysyllables, the metric system is for you. Consider the large number of one syllable words the English system has: inch, foot, yard, mile, ounce, pound, ton, (fluid) ounce, cup, pint, quart. But metric insists on appending a prefix to the base element; kilo-meter, centi-gram, deka-liter. Somehow this is supposed to be rational. One is taught to know the prefixes, which then can be appended to one of several bases (meter, gram, liter, watt, ampere, hertz, ...). That's why the names of metric measurements are so long. Do people really parse the words to reassure themselves that a kilometer is 1000 meters? Of course not. To burden the terminology with a naming convention that helps 5th graders understand the relationships is absurd. And anyway, most of us seem to use either milli-, centi-, or kilo- as prefixes. I have yet to read texts containing: decimeter (about 4 inches) or hectogram (about 1/4 pound) or dekaliter (about 10 quarts). So what we end up with are 2 or 3 familiar sizes, and we put two-digit numeric values ahead of them, e.g. 60 centimeters [6 syllables] (instead of 2 feet [2 syllables]).

INITIAL VALUES:
First, consider lengths. The meter was determined for strictly ideological reasons. As a result, there are no lengths that are human scaled. The centimeter is not as useful as the inch (hand scale) or foot (body scale). Next, examine standards of weight. Sorry, but the gram is just too lightweight for my taste. And liquid measurements suffer from the same problem. I'll take a cup of sugar over 225 milliliters any day.

WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE:
Steal the terminology from the English system, use multiples of 10 (or 2's or 5's), and have the base elements be human scaled. Tweak some relationships (like 1 pint = 2.5 cups). And keep those one-syllable names! A proposal:

Element	How defined	Present day English
LENGTH
inch	1.1 English inch	1.1 inch
foot	10 inches	.916 foot
yard	3 feet	.916 yard
rod	100 feet	1.8 rods
furlong	1000 feet	.720 furlong
mile	5000 feet	1.042 mile
WEIGHT
ounce	weight of cubic inch of water	.769 avoir.ounce
pound	10 ounces	.480 pound
invent wordA	1000 pounds	480 pounds
ton	5000 pounds	1.202 ton
VOLUME
ounce	cubic inch	.738 oz
cup	10 ounces	.960 cup
pint	2 1/2 cups (25 oz)	1.20 pint
quart	2 pints (50 oz)	1.20 quart
gallon	2 quarts (100 oz)	1.20 gallon
barrel	50 gallons	1.935 (31 gal barrel) 1.428 (42 gal barrel)
cord	1000 cubic feet	.769 cord
AREA
acre	40,000 sq. feet (200x200)	.771 acre
invent wordB	1 square furlong	7.8 hectare
sq. mile	25 million sq. feet	1.085 sq. mile

posted by Quiddity at 11/28/2003 02:54:00 PM