Try ordering a 113.3981-grammer burger at your local McDonald’s or Burger King. And then don’t be surprised when they don’t understand your order! That’s because the United States has not yet fully adopted the metric system. As a result, most U.S. citizens are not familiar with it. We don’t measure our quarter-pound burgers in grams. We measure them in fractions of pounds. In this example, one-quarter pound. That’s why we call that particular burger a “quarter-pounder.”
And that just might explain why the U.S. still isn’t on board with nationwide metrication. After all, “quarter-pounder” has much better marketing “zing” than does “113.3981-grammer.” Moreover, in our colloquial-ridden American speech, it makes perfect sense to us.
We Are Not Alone in Imperial Measurements
Most people who grew up learning how to measure in ounces, pounds, yards, miles, gallons and Fahrenheit, liken the metric system to a hard-to-learn foreign language. Most other countries around the world have transitioned from traditional units of measurement to the metric system. This process began in France during the 1790s and continues to the present day.
In spite of that, however, the metric system has not been fully adopted in all countries, including the United States. As of 2021, the U.S., Myanmar and Liberia are the only countries that have not officially adopted metrics as the primary means of weights and measures.
The big question is, why? Is it really all about being able to call our favorite burger a quarter-pounder? Or are there other reasons why we are so resistant to metrication?
Our Imperial Life
The first thing we need to remember is that, here in the U.S., we are dug deep into our mega-ounce coffee cups and the number of gallons of gas it takes to fuel our vehicles. While we use some metric measurements (e.g., one-liter soda bottles), most of our weights and measurements are still imperial (ounces, gallons, yard, miles, etc.). And the longer that goes on, the more deeply attached we are to them.
Simply put, we’re in an imperial-measurement rut. As nonsensical as imperial measures are, we have somehow or another managed to memorize that 12 inches equals one foot and 16 ounces equals one pound. We’re not about to joyfully abandon all of that hard work!
Yet, on the positive side, the metric system is an easier way to go about standardizing measurements than the imperial system is. Here’s why: Everything in the metric system divides into decimals (there are 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 1,000 grams in a kilogram, and so on). Inarguably, the metric system just makes sense. And that’s why almost all of the rest of the world uses it.
For example, water freezes at zero degrees Celsius (as opposed to the random 32 degrees Fahrenheit) and it boils at 100 C (instead of 212 F). As a result, the metric system doesn’t require us to memorize a lot of confounding temperature measurements.
At the same time, it’s mindboggling to think of just how many signs, instructions and other information would have to be changed if the U.S. were to seriously embark on metrication.
And, that just doesn’t make sense.
Aren’t We Officially Metricated?
The funny thing about this weights and measurements conundrum is that in 1975, the U.S. passed official legislation for metrication. Interestingly, conversion to the system was not mandatory, so many industries chose not to convert to it.
Almost twenty years later, on July 25, 1991, Executive Order 12770, otherwise known as the Metric Conversion Act, was signed by President George H.W. Bush. The order directed departments and agencies within the executive branch of the U.S. Government to take all appropriate measures within their authority to use the metric system as the preferred system of weights and measures for U.S. trade and commerce.
The executive order also authorized the Secretary of Commerce to form an Interagency Council on Metric Policy (ICMP), the purpose of which would have been to assist in the coordination of the Federal Government’s implementation of the order.
The problem is that, unlike other countries, in the U.S., there is no government-wide or major social desire to implement metrication. It should come as no surprise, then, that the order was never carried out. The best the U.S. has been able to achieve is a presentation of metric measurements alongside their imperial equivalents on things like measuring cups and soda bottles.
Hang onto your quarter-pounder, cooked to an optimal internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit. The road to metrication is going to continue to be a bumpy ride here in the U.S.
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I believe that all US food labelling is now in both systems. Our currency is essentially metric. Let’s do the same with remaining signage etc. and insist that all students learn only the metric system with any necessary references to the imperial relegated to history. Us older folks can either stick to Imperial or adapt and the youth and the flexible can lead the way to complete metrification
Our currency is ‘metricized’. That’s about as far as I’d like to go with the metric system.
Absent the crooked numbers associated with the Imperial system, especially given the inattentiveness of people these days, one has to wonder how many errors/disasters have been avoided due to a misplaced decimal.
We were well on our way to metrification in the mid 70s. But then the general public rebelled, and the momentum stopped. Folks didn’t hearing that the temperature tomorrow would be only 22 degrees. And most of the roads west of Pennsylvania are laid out in a 1 mile grid pattern, which influences our “global” thinking.
As both a civil engineer and a land surveyor I hope we never let ourselves be sucked into metrication.Here are a few reasons why metric doesn’t work for America.
All one needs to do to work on imports produced in metric is to buy a second set of wrenches
We tried metrication here in Vermont. For a while highway construction plans were issued in metric units. This was a disaster. Materials in metric units were larely unavailable from American supplierss. Converting metric units to imperial give wierd results. A huge investment in new tools and equipment would have been necessary to fully implement metrication. More importantly, construction people think in cubic yards, board feet, tons and inches/feet. We build in and for America. Construction is too expensive to allow the mistakes which transistioning to metric would entail.
Ever since colonial days land areas have been stated in acres and distances in feet and miles. Yes, there have been other units of measurement. Roods, roode, poles, chains and square reds. All of which combined to make an integrated system of measurement based on feet and miles, etc. Not surprisingly, the land so measured was, and will remain, in America. There is nothing to be gained by upsetting the historical, and fully understood, descriptions.
As the adage goes “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
During the early ” 70 ,s a world wide conference agreed to the METRIC system ,which included the U.S.A.
The U.S. congress reviewed the agreement and one Representative from a lower U.S state claimed it was too difficult for his voters so the whole Agreement was dropped.
So is driving a motor car but people manage to learn.
Just think of the cost of replacing all the highway signs and mile markers. We would never vote to approve such a frivolous expense!
Hmmm… Let’s take a look at how well other countries have really adopted the metric system. We can use Great Britain as an example.
You can still order beer by the pint. (And when you find beer in bottles, it’s often 33cl which is a fractional oddity the metric system was trying to avoid.)
People’s weights are still measured in stones and pounds.
Occasionally, they’re measured in kilograms, a unit of mass, not weight.
Plumbing still uses inch-based threads (because plumbing lasts a long time and it makes no sense to retrofit all the plumbing in all the buildings just to make it metric).
Tyres are still made and sold inch-derived units.
I’ve done machine design in both inches and mm. Either works. The hardest part is when people don’t understand significant digits, measurement accuracy or approximation, such as our author’s 113.3981-grammer burger.
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Switching gears — as long as I have the floor — have you ever thought about how much easier our number system would be if we were born with eight fingers?
We’d be using base eight (octal). Our most common fractions would be much simpler. 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 would be 0.4, 0.2 and 0.1 as decimals. Computer math would also be much simpler. Eight bits / eight fingers.
I have to use the metric system at times. I have no inherent feel for what a Pascal is. I do understand what a pound per square inch represents. The Pascal is one Newton per square meter. What’s a Newton? A Newton is the force necessary to accelerate one kilogram of mass at a rate of one meter per second squared. That’s all good physics, but I’d rather write or say psi.
It wouldn’t be difficult to switch road speed signs to metric. You’re just comparing the speed on your dashboard to the street sign. How hard is that?
The metric system in theory has a great concept: everything is base 10. However the standard chosen for length in the metric system (the meter) has no basis in nature -unlike the “foot” which everyone who has two can somewhat relate to. The original meter is simply the distance between two marks on an iron bar kept in Paris. Why couldn’t the meter simply have been redefined using the yard? (currently a meter is defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of orange-red light, in a vacuum. I am sure the common man has a tangible feel for orange-red light wavelengths in a vacuum -yeah right).
The bottom line is this is a standard that is every bit as arbitrary i(except the base 10 concept) as Imperial and was pushed by the then reigning European powers. It has not improved technology. It is simply a different standard. Not better.
I am a EE and work globally. I have been required to adopt the metric system and conversions so that I can relate the different temps, weights, power and others to imperial, so that I can understand it better.
I would have zero problems if we just did a switch and said here on out… metric. It will take that type of drastic action to covert.
Bigger problems arise when a simple conversion is not enough. Trying to convert steel shapes from Imperial to Metric is one example. There are few if any straight conversions. So the person converting the design needs to find shapes with the same or greater section modulus and then redesign around the new beams since the depth, width, and thicknesses all change. It requires significant resources to change equipment designs that use the shapes and the equipment that rolls the shapes. This is not a reason to never do it, but some hurdles will take more time and effort to clear than just learning and becoming comfortable with the metric system.
The resistance to adoption of metric units in many English-speaking countries is a linguistic problem, and in America specifically we have become a very litigious culture so that IMPRECISION is socially necessary much more often than precision and exactitude. Indeed it’s a common comedy gag in SF stories to laugh at a character who uses excess numerical precision; usually an android or an emotionally challenged, logic-uber-alles character like Mr. Spock. Metric unit multiplier prefixes usually rank by 1000s (kilo, mega, giga; milli, micro,nano) with a few which rank by 10 or hundred (deca, hecto; deci, centi) These orders of magnitude work well when everyone is carrying values to three or more significant figures.
But emotionally, when your recipe calls for 2 cups (473cc) of something and you dump in 2 and 1/4 (532cc) to finish off the box, you don’t feel like a klutz for being a quarter-unit off. But you -do- feel klutzier by being off by 59cc. Thus with Imperial and US customary systems (they *are* different – an Imperial pint is NOT a U.S. pint!) some kind of unit or other is often available that is a natural exponent (“e”=2.71828…) or a small integer number larger or smaller than another unit, so that a unit is nearly always available to express a quantity as a single digit and a fraction – NOT a three decimal place value. The English system allows one- and two-places liability-deflecting estimates for almost any question requesting a numerical value.
Secondly as in mentioned by others, most English unit names are their own operational definitions. People’s surnames don’t tell you how to make a field-expedient measurement, but a cup, a chain, a rod, a bushel, a barrel, and other handy tricks: a thumb for an inch, your nose to your fingertip for a yard, a fathom of rope, etc – all these provide rough and ready standards for making approximate measurements which can be re-calibrated to official standards later. The word itself tells you what to do. No one at home, in the yard, or the garage is going to count 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of light in a vacuum produced by burning some krypton-86 to get a “meter.” Also, never underestimate the power of a common word to connote material consistency and to convey hints about the kinds of things they are and are not fit for counting. Although a ‘dollop’ isn’t an official unit, note how it implies that the stuff being measured out adheres to the serving vessel and can be flicked off decisively. English units place you in the sewing room with your great aunt, on a whaling dory with a harpooneer, in his ship’s hold with wooden [barrels] of the world’s finest machine lubricant and lamp fuel, in the fields with a [bushel] of fresh-picked produce or feeling for when it is time to rest or turn your plow ox (a furlong,) and in an abattoir with a freshly butchered [hog’s head.] Metric units are entirely sterilized of these ancillary qualities.
The convenience of 1 one these equals one of those is often touted as metric convenience; a liter of water weights 1kg. In English, “a pint’s around the world around,” and 1 BTU raises 1 pound of water 1 degree F.
Next, most English unit names are single or two-syllable words with closed consonants. They “sound right,” and fit in well in the dark, oily Germanic engine-room of our language, while Renaissence Greek and Latin FOUR-syllable unit words of SI are the foppy passengers in their ornate staterooms. English units signal that you a working class, part of what makes the ship go. Metric units are for people just cruising along for the ride.
Lastly, not all metric conversions are simple powers of ten. How many Joules are in an electron volt?
Reading the number on the sign is easy. Getting a metric U-channel to fit with and bolt to the existing Imperial U-channel in concrete in the ground is a whole different challenge.
We make all our pipe in the US in inches. All are pipe mills manufacture in inches. And we have the Schedule 10,20 and 40 wall thicknesses. All pressures in industry used to be psi up until 5 years ago when I retired. What about the boiler HP ratings? In the chemical industry british units will always be king.
We make all our pipe in the US in inches. All our pipe mills manufacture in inches. And we have the Schedule 10,20 and 40 wall thicknesses. All pressures in industry used to be psi up until 5 years ago when I retired. What about the boiler HP ratings? In the chemical industry british units will always be king. I can’t imagine the $ to retool our pipe and tubing mills. We still make HP motors for our pumps don’t we? GPM is still the standard units for pumps? GPM at FT head.
All our pipe mills in the U S manufacture in inches. The cost to retool our pipe and tubing mills is prohibitive. You would have to subsidize the mills if you arbitrarily make a change. I beams , channel etc are made to inches. Rails are manufactured in inches I believe. The construction, chemical, gas & oil, and all manufacturing would not go along with metric. We are the industrial power of the world. We don’t need to change
All our pipe mills in the U S manufacture in inches. The cost to retool our pipe and tubing mills is prohibitive. You would have to subsidize the mills if you arbitrarily make a change. I beams , channel etc are made to inches. Rails are manufactured in inches I believe. The construction, chemical, gas & oil, and all manufacturing would not go along with metric. We are the industrial power of the world. We don’t need to change
Those who don’t favor converting to metric because of cost appear to be blind to the inherent cost of remaining in the English imperial system. We are the only major country who has not gone metric and are thus in conflict with all of our major trading partners. The complicated imperial conversions within itself and between it and the metric system have led to errors throughout the decades.
We should also recall that one of the space probes sent to Mars ~20 years ago missed its mark because someone did calculations using British Thermal Units rather than the required metric units (probably kilowatts) which were standard for NASA at the time (Yes it really was rocket science!).
Obviously there will be pain involved in converting over to Metric, but we should start soon and carefully plan it to minimize the cost and pain. Eventually, the international trade realities will make it too costly for us to remain in the English system. We can’t expect the rest of the world to continue to cater to our terribly outdated and confusing system.
And, yes, we can still continue to call our burgers quarter pounders even after we convert!
I’ve worked on industrial design for over 30 years. There are so many building materials in the US based on imperial units. 2×4 wood studs, structural steel shapes like W12x120 (12″ deep by 120 lb/ft), piping components like 14 inch diameter pipe. How do we change all those engineering drawings for all those existing plants and buildings. You would still need the same materials just calling them by some other weird numbers with no upside. For example 6″ pipe would be 150 mm pipe but have the exact same dimensions for compatibility with existing systems. It’s a lot more complicated than speedometers and hamburgers.
As was stated above, pipes and steel beams are based on imperial units. You can call a 2’x4′ concrete inlet “600 mm x 1200mm” but the casting forms are still 2’x4′. Changing all the mills and fabrication plants will be more costly than it’s worth. Conversion is not exact and causes problems. I was involved in a small box culvert project in metric – just reading the topo map in meters instead of contours in feet was difficult, then stationing the road, establishing benchmarks, designing guiderail, etc. was harder than you realize. Performing surveys, converting old deeds to metric, preparing new plats, acquiring ROW just for a sliver of easement was dumb. Our imperial system works fine for us.
The metric system would be great if you could divide any of the units by three. We really erred in not having six fingers on each hand. Most metric units cannot be divided by four, six, eight, or nine – most standard units can. This why a circle has 360 degrees , not some multiple of ten; 360 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 15, 24, and so on.
The Centigrade thing is just a less-useful temperature scale. Using the Fahrenheit is more sensible (most ambient temperatures in a temperate or tropical region are positive two digit values).
Which is better: driving on the left or driving on the right?
I think the retooling argument is a red herring. You can still make the item 1/4 in. You just need to label it the appropriate size as 6.353 mm. Using metric doesn’t mean you have to retool to only use round numbers. Once we get used to using those scales, adopting round numbers will be less of a challenge further down the road will be less of an issue.
We talk about 2×4 lumber but it isn’t. Could call it 5×10 cm lumber and be just as accurate. Same with a lot of pipe. 12 inch water pipe is not 12″ either inside or out. If we want to have international trade, we will have to make products to metric. I’m more used to a lot of things in English units, but some are easier in metric. Country is big enough people in the restaurant biz probably won’t need to learn metric any time soon, but medical and some others will or probably have.
I prefer to measure velocity in forlongs per fortnight. At best metrification won’t make my crescent wrench obsolite
I have always thought about this, a hectogram is close enough to a quarter of a pound (0.22 lbs). I could enjoy ordering a “double hg w/ cheese.”
Converting to the metric system is fractional, but dangerous, step towards globalization. Yes, the USA trades with countries around the world, but at least for now, we are a sovereign country. Globalization is the real question here…we can learn from history and the pitfalls of globalization.
Why haven’t the UK and other British commonwealth countries switched the roads and highways to drive on the right, with steer wheels on the left in their cars and trucks? Why did the UK “Brexit” from the Euro? And, how’s Europe’s open borders “experiment” working? The quick answer is “problematic at best” Open borders is convenient for law-biding citizens visiting neighboring countries, but is a disaster for controlling immigration and illegal activities. Europeans are now realizing this and speaking out.
It doesn’t stop with simply converting to the metric system. This is a small step towards the larger goal of globalization, which would be the downfall of the USA as a prosperous sovereign country. I get it base 10 makes the math easier, but since the metric system is so simple, we can continue to convert as needed when dealing with other countries. Globalization is a huge mistake.