Letter: Imperial vs. metric
This past month we have had freezing temperatures in the valley. It has also been rather chilly in Belgium where my lovely email pal Natalie lives. She writes to me in English and I reply in French, with a wee bit of assistance from my good friend, Google Translate. I am being forced to talk in Celsius and she in Fahrenheit.
That has me thinking back to my school days in the 1960s when I was educated in both systems so Britain might move seamlessly to the metric system a few years later. The United States government was making a similar shift, not for any political reason but, like Britain, to adopt internationally accepted norms and be better placed to take advantage of global markets. In Britain we were all forced to “go metric” but in the United States, while the federal government fully adopted the metric system, it was left up to individual states to decide whether to convert or not.
So when I moved from Europe to Colorado and got a job as a teacher and a land surveyor, I discovered both systems in use in the schools and the construction industry and, while it was strangely comforting for an old git like me, it was also somewhat disconcerting. I quite liked being ahead of the game, due to my having done it all many years before, but I had grown up thinking that the United States was the land of tip-top management and efficiency. So, still being stuck with gallons, feet, inches, and degrees Fahrenheit irked me because it made little sense.
I soon realized that chemistry — and science in general — is harder for students if they have to change back and forth between units of measurement. Doing that also increased the risk of errors in the production of plats and plans in the construction industry and then in the use of them by tradesmen of all sorts. It seems crazy that the change to the metric system still hasn’t happened in the states over 50 years after the federal government adopted it.
George Washington had a good way of explaining it all, as can be seen in a recent “Saturday Night Live” skit. I might send it to Natalie, to help her understand.
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Nicholas T. Fickling
Edwards
