Here is an item on why the US hasn’t gone metric. It makes
iheresting reading. It’s from this website:
http://future.newsday.com/3/fbak0326.htm
Richard
Why Metrics Didn’t Measure Up Predictions from the past that haven’t
come true … yet By Erik Nelson Special Correspondent
IF PEOPLE LIKE Lorelle Young had their way, Americans by now would
be tanking up their hulking sport-utility vehicles by the liter,
ringing up their T-bone steaks and Idaho potatoes by the kilogram,
and fertilizing their wheat crops by the hectare.
Metric measurement – grams instead of pounds, liters instead of
ounces, meters instead of feet – was expected by many to dominate in
all areas of American life by the new millennium. Educators
throughout the nation began teaching it and, in many cases, promoting
it in the 1970s.
``We thought we’d be metric but we’re not,‘’ said Young, president
of the U.S. Metric Association. The private group, started by a group
of businessmen in the early part of the century, has been pushing for
metric conversion ever since.
Despite several attempts to bring the United States in line with the
rest of the world – and even legislation to encourage it – the
nation stands with only Liberia and Myanmar in resisting metric
conversion.
There will never be a metric system that replaces the customary system'' in the United States, said Seaver Leslie, director of Americans for Customary Weight and Measure.
The foot will prevail,
human measure will prevail, because of its practicality, accuracy and
its poetry.‘’
Among the first American proponents of the metric system was
Francophile Thomas Jefferson, who once noted that the French had just
developed a new decimal-based system of measurements, and Americans
would do well to adopt it along with their new decimal-based
currency.
Alexander Graham Bell told Congress in 1906 that scientists prefer
the metric system because it makes the math easier. Testifying on an
ill-fated bill introduced by New York Rep. L.N. Littauer that would
have forced government agencies to go metric, Bell said: ``If you
pass it . . . you have decided to abolish the chaotic systems of
weights and measures we now have.‘’
As early as 1866, Congress legalized use of the metric system in
business, while keeping customary or standard measurement as the
official national system. More than 100 years later, Congress in
1975 passed the Metric Conversion Act, setting up a board to
``coordinate and plan the increasing use of the metric system.‘’
The act accomplished very little. Americans got more than a bit
testy when they saw highway mileage signs in kilometers, in addition
to miles, and called upon Congress to stop this foreign invasion. By
1982, the once-burgeoning U.S. Metric Board dissolved, its budget
zeroed out by President Ronald Reagan.
In 1988, President George Bush, who was big on international
cooperation, signed a bill that required federal agency contracts to
be converted by 1992, but that met fierce resistance from the makers
of bricks and blocks and recessed lighting. They said the change
would cost them tremendously, noting they would have to retool their
factories specifically for federal contracts.
Still, proponents argue that metrication would make everything
simpler. The metric system is the best system in the world,'' raves John Font, auto mechanic and owner of Hicksville Motors in Hicksville.
You know how to count money? That’s good. You know the
metric system.‘’
Shoppers will drop a 2-liter bottle of root beer or a 500-milliliter
bottle of mouthwash in their shopping cart without stopping to think
about it. We may not be thinking about it, but metrication has taken
hold in some aspects of American life.
Today, manufacturers of pre-packaged goods in the United States must
label their products in both metric and standard measurement. The
National Institute of Standards and Technology, a division of the
Commerce Department, is helping draft legislation that would allow
manufacturers to drop standard measurement from labels entirely.
Championing the process of encouraging metric measurement today is a
staff of four in the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Director Gerard Iannelli corrects himself when he says switch to metric.''
I meant, `use’ the metric system. I don’t want to scare
people.‘’
Joe Sieczka is one of the people who does notice when metric is used
and when standard measurement is used. In fact, it’s part of his job.
As coordinator of Cornell University’s Long Island Horticulture
Research Lab in Riverhead, he lectures farmers about what to put on
their fields and in what amounts.
If I'm talking to the farmers, I'm talking about 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre,'' just as he did to potato growers in Syracuse Feb. 10.
If I’m talking to the scientists, then I’m going to be
talking about 112 kilograms per hectare.‘’
Educators have been struggling with how to teach the system as well.
There was a time in the '70s when we taught entire units on metrics, but it kind of petered out,'' said Laura Scaduto, a fifth-grade teacher at Signal Hill Elementary School in Dix Hills who favors conversion.
Now we teach both systems.‘’
If students learned only the metric system, U.S. school systems
could save 71 days of instruction and $17.653 billion, according to a
study published in the educational research journal Evaluation Review
in 1996.
Nicolina C. Seganti, office manager at Associated Marble Industry
Inc. in Inwood, has had to teach herself to convert. She receives
shipments of marble tiles from suppliers from Italy to Taiwan, all
marked in metric.
She has a little pamphlet with a conversion chart, but she has
committed the sizes to memory in both measurement systems.
``I guess it would be easier,‘’ she said of a uniform conversion in
the United States.
But the resistance endures. I still have kids coming up to me saying, well, my mother and father said: Why should we convert to the metric system?'' says Wayne Mammina, science coordinator and fourth-grade teacher at Edgar School in Rocky Point.
I tell them:
because the rest of the world uses it.‘’