TECHNOLOGY

Who's Afraid of the Metric System?

A historian explains why the U.S. still hasnt adopted the global standard.

The U.S. platinum-iridium meter bar used until 1960 to define the meter.
Wikimedia Commons

YONI APPELBAUM
8:00 AM ET

When former Rhode Island senator and governor Lincoln Chafee formally
jumped into the presidential race on Wednesday, he made a splash. There
are good reasons to take Chafees bid seriously, but his speech drew the
most attention for a less-conventional proposal. Lets join the rest of the
world and go metric, he said.
His call was not universally embraced. Labeling it the worst idea of the

campaign, the National Reviews Jim Geraghty blustered, with perhaps a

touch of humor: You will get my American system ruler when you pry it
from my cold dead hand. Advocates of the metric system are accustomed
to such scorn. Back in 1972, Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell was
attacked by his Republican opponent for wasting time on low-priority items
like the metric system. The politician leveling that attack? John Chafee.
But Lincoln Chafee, Johns son, is undeterred. People say its expensive,
but the economic benefits outweigh the cost, he told CNN. Many experts
agree. Which raises an interesting question: Why, exactly, doesnt the
United States already use the metric system?
To find out, I turned to Stephen Mihm, associate professor of history at the
University of Georgia, and author of the forthcoming book, Mastering
Modernity: Weights, Measures, and the Standardization of American Life.
Yoni Appelbaum: Let's start at the beginning. What's the utility of having
a single, standardized system of measurement?
Stephen Mihm: It permits nations, individuals, or corporations who would
otherwise be hampered in their efforts at communicating, trading, or
sharing information. Think of it as a common language. If everyone in the
world speaks English, it's very easy to do business, travel, and engage in
trade. The same is true of a single, standardized system of weights and
measures.
Appelbaum: Much of the world started moving to the metric system in the
late nineteenth century. You've written that the United States didn't follow,
because of the humble screw thread. For want of a screw, the metric
system was lost?

Mihm: Many factors played a role in frustrating the adoption of the metric
system in the United States. But much of the opposition from the 1870s
onward came from the manufacturers of high-end machine tools. They had
based their entire systemwhich encompassed everything from lathe
machines to devices for cutting screw threadson the inch. Retooling, they
argued, was prohibitively expensive. They successfully blocked the
adoption of the metric system in Congress on a number of occasions in the
late nineteenth and twentieth century.

The most sophisticated and powerful opponents of

the metric system were engineers who built the
industrial infrastructure of the United States.
Appelbaum: So the people blocking adoption of the metric system weren't
backward-looking traditionalists, but cutting-edge industrialists?
Mihm: That's correct. While the anti-metric forces included outright
cranks, including people who believed that the inch was a God-given unit of
measurement, the most sophisticated and powerful opponents of the
metric system were anything but cranks. They were engineers who built
the industrial infrastructure of the United States. And their concerns, while
self-interested, were not entirely off base. Whatever the drawbacks of the
English units, the inch was divided in ways that made sense to the
mechanics and machinists of the era: it was built around "2s" rather than
"10s," with each inch subdivided in half and in half againand so forth.
This permitted various sizes of screw thread to have some logical
correspondence to all the other increments. The same was true of the sizes
of other small parts that were essential modern machinery.

Appelbaum: We've arrived at a hybrid system. Most American rulers show

inches along one edge, centimeters along the other. Is it possible that the
metric system will slowly displace English measurements, not by
government fiat, but one inch at a time?
Mihm: Yes, that's right. If history is any guide, government fiats don't work
when it comes to weights and measures. The undertow of history and
custom is too strong (proponents of the metric system, for example, are
often unaware that it too many decades for France to get its citizens to
adopt itthere were many, many setbacks and a staggering amount of
resistance).

Government fiats don't work when it comes to

weights and measures.
Appelbaum: Chafee's call for the United States to adopt the metric system
generated an immediate backlash. Why does a seemingly dry subject like
metrology ignite such intense passions?
Mihm: National pride is at stake. The adoption of another country's
weights and measuresor in the case of the metric system, the rest of the
world's weights and measuresseems an infringement on national
sovereignty. That the system in question has a long and distinguished
history as a pet project of Francophile, cosmopolitan liberals probably
doesn't help make it appealing to American conservatives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
YONI APPELBAUM is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Politics
section.
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