99% Invisible - 280- Half Measures

Episode Date: October 18, 2017

The United States is one of just a handful of countries that that isn’t officially metric. Instead, Americans measure things our own way, in units that are basically inscrutable to non-Americans, nearly all of whom have been brought up in an all-metric environment. Most of the world uses meters, liters, and kilograms, not yards, gallons, and pounds. With so many industries and people crossing borders with so much fluidity, why has the U.S. not fully committed to the system the rest of the world uses? The answer is complicated. Half Measures

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. 6, 5, 4... Cast your mind back to the late 1990s. We have ignition and we have lift off of NASA's Mars climate orbiter as we continue to explore the mysteries of the red planet. It's the late 20th century, and as a threat of Y2K and rap metal crossover, loom large in people people's minds and NASA satellite blasts off towards Mars That's producer Joel Werner from the sum of all parts podcast

22nds after liftoff Everything continues to go well So this satellite weighing 338 kilograms That's 745 pounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get to that. So the satellite weighing 338 kilograms hurdles through space towards the distant planet. It takes nearly a year to get there and when it gets close, the satellite fires its main engine to go into orbit around Mars. Up until that point, all data from the spacecraft appeared normal. Everything was running smoothly.

The engine burn begins just as the spacecraft disappears behind Mars. Mission control waits for it to reappear, and they wait, and wait, and wait. But the spacecraft never emerges. The Mars climate orbiter is lost. I'm sorry to report that we have a serious problem with the Mars Climate Orbiter. We may in fact be facing a loss of mission. We believe the spacecraft came in at a lower altitude than we had intended, and that depending on how low that was and it's something we're still going to confirm, it potentially resulted in the loss of the measure.

Scientists at NASA began to pour over the data, looking for clues as to what might have gone wrong. And before long, they figured out. The spacecraft was supposed to approach the planet at an altitude of 150 kilometers or 93 miles, when in fact its approach had been lower, much lower. The post-mortem at NASA found that a pretty simple arrow was to blame. A conversion error. The NASA investigative board confirmed the cause

of the failure of the $125 million spacecraft. The NASA team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory assumed they were using the metric system to measure rocket firings while NASA was using the metric system, the International Standard for its calculations. But one of their contractors was using US customary units, the proper term for the American system of inches, pounds, and gallons. Years of planning, hundreds of millions of dollars literally up in smoke burned up in the Martian atmosphere and all because someone did the right calculation in the wrong

units. This wasn't the only time a conversion error resulted in disaster or near disaster. In the early 80s an airliner ran out of fuel mid-flight after a metric conversion error and had to make an emergency landing. And in 2001, the LA Zoo loaned a 75-year-old Galapagos tortoise to an animal management program at a local college. The zoo warned that the Clarence, the tortoise, was big and needed an enclosure for an animal weighing 250 kilograms. But the college thought they meant 250 pounds, which is only 113 kilograms, about half his actual weight.

His first night in his new home, Clarence destroyed it. But these kinds of failures haven't been enough to get the U.S. to switch over to the measurement system used by the vast majority of the world. We Americans measure things our own way, in units that are basically inscrutable to non-Americans, nearly all of whom have been brought up in an all-metric environment. They use meters, liters, and kilograms, not yards, gallons, and pounds. You might have noticed that I'm a non-American myself. And while I've never lost a spacecraft to a distant planet, I have run into other problems,

like ordering way too much delimit. Too much delimit is never a problem, Joel. I lived in the US for a couple of years, and while culturally a lot came easy, I never really adjusted to your measurement system. Australia, where I'm from, has been a metric country for over 40 years. I grew up metric. I don't really have a sense of how much half a pound weighs or how warm 60 degrees Fahrenheit is.

And two years wasn't enough to change that. So when I lived in the States, I'd routinely head out and cold weather without a jacket or come home with too much bacon. So why, with so many industries and people like Joel crossing borders with so much fluidity, has the US not fully committed to the system the rest of the world uses? As you might guess, it's complicated. So the magic system has a kind of complicated history in the United States. This is Steven Mim, a history professor at the University of Georgia, and the author of

a forthcoming book on the history of standardization in the United States. It's in the 1790s when the United States was first fumbling around toward fulfilling the constitutional mandate to create a uniform system of weights and measures. The metric system was at that point just a glimmer in the eye of a bunch of French revolutionaries. And there was some discussion at the time, led by Thomas Jefferson, that the US adopt a decimal-based system, kind of like the eventual metric system, but the idea didn't gain much traction. So when it came time to systematize American weights and measures,

we ultimately threw our lot with what we were working with at the time, which was the bushels and pounds and feet and so forth. America had inherited this old system of measurement from the British. It had its roots in Roman and Anglo-Saxon units, and then evolved over a thousand of years before American independence. But around the same time French revolutionaries were heading in a new direction. They opted to throw out their old system, which they found displeasingly irrational, and switch it for a new system. The metric system. The metric system is a decimal system, meaning it relies on multiples of 10. 10 millimeters become one centimeter,

100 centimeters become one meter, and so on. The French began promoting the system internationally, arguing that it would encourage trade and bring the world together, and it took off. By the mid-19th century, there was a growing adoption of the metric system worldwide. And as the metric system spread, some people in the US started to feel left out, like educators and scientists, they wanted the US to get with the program and officially go metric. It lends itself really well to scientific research and inquiry. And for educators, it's really easy to teach students and it makes a lot of sense. But abandoning the US customary system did not sit well with a lot of people.

There was tremendous resistance. And the resistance came from a few different quarters, some of which overlap. But the most interesting was a group of astronomers, theologians, and cranks, and keep in mind that those categories, which we consider separate and distinct today, were not at this time. And so those people came to believe that there was a biblical basis for the inch, and that

that biblical basis was marked in the great pyramid of Giza and the architecture of that pyramid. This theory got more and more elaborate and gained a lot of followers, as the astronomers and theologians combine scientific arguments with other wild and nonsensical ideas. But welded it all together into what was for many people a compelling argument that to abandon the inch and then all of the other weights and measures was to go against God's will. So science and education with this newer, shinier measurement system versus religious sell-its,

clinging to what they know fearful of change. It's a good story, but it's only part of the story. In the US, in the 1870s, the real core resistance came from a different group entirely, some of the most innovative industrialists of their day. The answer lies with engineers and with machine tool industry in the late 19th and 20th centuries, who had tooled up enormous vast factories and a vast industrial base, that by the 1870s sat at the heart of what was now the largest economy in the world.

This vast industrial system included everything from lathes to devices for cutting screw threats, and it was all based on the inch. The manufacturers did not want to retool. They said it would be way too expensive, and not just that. They also argued that there was an intuitiveness to the customary system. You have an inch, you have a half inch, a quarter inch, eighth inch, 16 and so on. That kind of division on the shop floor, maybe not for a scientist, but on the shop floor, makes a huge amount of sense. And it's very simple, it's very straightforward, it's very easy to learn, and it's very

easy to build machines around that concept. And all because everything is simply doubled or halved. And the arguments of these late 19th century industrialists proved incredibly influential. So to put this in a context, this would be like today, the tech sector and the titans of the tech sector pushing back and saying, you know, a metric system over our dead bodies. And so the industrialists and the cranks win this round. Subsequent generations make attempts to introduce the metric system to the US and they are met with subsequent generations of resistance.

Congress repeatedly brings up legislation to make the metric system not just legal, but mandatory. And each time the legislation goes down in flames. But then, in the 1970s, about 100 years after the first big push for metrication and on the back of a wave of metrication around the world, another attempt is made to bring the metric system to the US. And this time, it really catches on. Congress actually passes an act in 1975 declaring the metric system the preferred system of weights and measures for the United States trade and commerce. And then President Gerald

Ford follows it up with an executive order. In both cases, the adoption of the metric system is deemed voluntary. But the government really tries to make it happen. Take 10 America to learn the metric way, to simple system based on 10s that you can start today, you fish in more accurate, more universal too, it's good for our economy, our cashier and for you. The US Office of Education ran PSAs like this one. People started pinning take me to your leader buttons to their jackets, that's LITER. There was a popular poster

soul that featured a woman in a bikini with a slogan think metric above her and her measurements in centimeters below. 92 61 92 turns out you can be sexist in metric 2. 2, 61, 92. Turns out you can be sexist in metric 2. Take 10 minutes to learn the metric way. Right metric education PO box 111 Washington DC, 2.0044. Take 10, this message is brought to you. With the 1975 metric conversion act, it didn't really have any teeth. It included the word voluntary, which meant that businesses

and organizations could opt out of using it, so some organizations and industries went metric and others did not. That decision to take a voluntary approach to medication was different than the way a lot of other countries approached it, where they passed actual laws and made it mandatory. Taking a softer approach meant that the US adoption remained incomplete and vulnerable to opposition. Once again, the anti-metric forces began together. And once again, this resistance came from multiple directions. For one, there were the unions who

were scared that moving to an international system of measurement would make it easier for big corporations to ship jobs offshore. Various writers and thinkers fought against the metric system too. People like author Tom Wolf and futurist Stuart Brand, the creator of the whole Earth catalog. Brand argued that the US system was, quote, more suited to humans. He pointed out that a human foot was about the length of a foot, and that a yard was about the length of a person's outstretched arm to the center of their body. It was more intuitive, he said. And then finally, there was also a political argument against the US going metric. As the

Jimmy Carter era of the mid-1970s gave way to the Reagan era of the early 1980s, a variety of movements rose up against globalism and elitism. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite, in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves, but beyond that. The U.S. economy was hurting and the nation's pride had taken a few hits.

And as a result, anti-metric opposition began to take on a kind of defiant nationalism. And the metric campaign withered, I think, in the face of this, because it seemed to be yet another example for conservatives of the United States sort of selling out its patrimony to largely Europeans that seems to have been the kind of xenophobic subtext. You can imagine this You know, we lost in Vietnam and now we're going to adopt the magic system You know, what does the world come to? That's what this was sort of perceived as it was the pendulum swinging too far to this kind of namby-pamby internationalism.

That sounds weirdly familiar. And all of this meant that efforts to metricate the US were left stranded, halfway between the old and the new. And in a typically American way, it was left up to the market to decide who went metric and who didn't. Which has led to this weird situation where get this, the US is already about halfway there. The US really is a metric nation. We just don't know that we're a metric nation. Sally Mitchell is a high school chemistry and physics teacher in upstate New York and a passionate advocate for the metric system.

I mean, she's even written a metric cookbook. We use the metric system almost everywhere. Likker stores, medicines, everything is in grams, leaders. I have a water bottle here right now, it's 500 milliliters. It's there. It's just our choice. I can look at this bottle and see 16.9 flu announces. I can choose to read 1.05 pints, or I can choose to read 500 milliliters.

The US is on what's called a metric continuum. The fields of science and medicine are almost fully-metricated and with little controversy. But in the business realm, it's a mix. Some businesses are fully-metricricated, others not at all, and a lot are left somewhere in between. Here in the United States, we have large international businesses. Elizabeth Gentry is the metric coordinator in the Office of Wates and Measures at NIST,

the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST is the organization that standardizes measurement in the US. These are companies that have international supply chains. What they're looking for is the ability to sell the product in many marketplaces and they get the components for the product all around the world and they need to fit together and have a really reliable product. These are companies like Xerox and Caterpillar and Levi Strauss and they went metric during the Mettrication push back in the 1970s. And then you have on the other end of the spectrum small businesses here in the United States.

And for these smaller local businesses, the economic imperative to metricate just isn't there. Like think of a dairy farmer. And there's just one thing that really holds us back. It's milk. And milk comes in a gallon. And milk is not shipped internationally. So the farmer can't afford to retool everything

to put it into leaders. And so it's been a gallon. Yet another unit that confused our intrepid Australian reporter Joel when he shopped in American grocery stores By combed Joel's milk comes in leaders not gallons have gallons and courts, and it's it's funny because most people don't know a Court and a leader which one's bigger Yeah, I don't know that like yeah, I have no idea Well, this is how you remember it. A leader is a leader bit more. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha on the other. But you've also got a lot of business caught somewhere in between, which is where it gets really tricky. Some companies end up having to maintain two separate production

lines, even two separate warehouses, to manage all the different versions of their products. It's a total headache, and it's expensive too. And so that's where we're at. We've got a nation stretched out across a continuum of medication, dual units, and conversion confusion. A history of near misses, bad timing, and it's all mixed in with a serious cultural resistance to the system of measurement adopted around the world. This cultural resistance highlights the difficulties of

introducing a new system of measurement anywhere. Even the average French citizen hated their new system of measurement anywhere, even the average French citizen hated their new system when it was first introduced back in the Revolutionary Age. The bottom line is this, it's really difficult to get people to change from a measurement system they've been using their whole life. A nurse's resistance to change is a massive obstacle to overcome. You know, when I think about, all right, what's harder, occupying a country, conquering

it and putting it under your heel or getting them to adopt your unit of weights and measures. Like, you can do the first one, but the second one can really, really rough you up because it, it's even if people do it on the face of it, they're constantly converting back into the, to the ghost units that ghost units that have been banned. They just continue to do it. But resistance to the metric system in the US continues to have a subtext that goes beyond just preferring a familiar system. Today may be more than ever, the resistance to metric is about the rise of a new kind of

nationalism in our country. Take the case of Sally Mitchell, who you heard from earlier. She's the high school science teacher from Upstate New York. Back in 2014, she stepped right into the middle of the whole metric versus US units debate. And it got brutal. It actually started out in Syracuse when the airport had gotten a new sign. Syracuse airport is an international airport, and the old sign had displayed the temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius, the metric systems preferred unit.

But the Celsius option hadn't been activated on this new sign. It was only showing Fahrenheit. So I called and they said, oh, we forgot to program it. Let me do it. It'll be ready by tomorrow. And I think I posted something online that said, don't you worry, it'll be fixed by tomorrow. And then the next thing you know at the newspaper was calling me and they wanted to do a story on this.

I said, no, no, not a story. Please don't know a story on this. But they did a story anyway. And then a radio station called and did an interview with her. And the host of that radio show would decidedly anti-metric. And they said, do you want a teacher that wants to drill her metric agenda into people's heads and how dare she and things like that? And they were mean and they were awful. The next thing you know it, phone calls to the school, I had threats on Facebook, threats through emails. I had people writing to me, demanding that I be fired

because I just wanted the sign to display Celsius again. It got really crazy. The threats were so bad. And I had to report that to the police. And I thought, wow, people need to get alive for something or really think, why, why are you doing this? I'm doing this for science, I'm doing this for international communication, I'm doing this as an educator. Sometimes when Sally Mitchell talks about the metric system, you get the sense she's talking about

a lot more than the metric system. People like me are starting to speak up, and we're not going to have it anymore. This is not the way we are. We're an intelligent nation, and we want what's best for our children. We want what's best for our communities around us. And so that's why I'm speaking up now. I am more vocal than I've ever, ever been, and I'm just not going to take it anymore. I'm not going to let the ignorant be the loudest. Mm. But those anti-metric trolls that Sally had to deal with, she's pretty much guaranteed to have the last laugh.

Because those customer US units, the inches and pounds, they're actually defined relative to the metric system. Here's Elizabeth Gentry of NIST again. Usually consumers are at the grocery store, they may buy a gallon of milk, or they're at the gas station, and they buy a gallon of gas. They think, well, I'm using all of these US customer units all the time in my life. That must mean the United States hasn't really adopted the metric system. But the system that makes sure a gallon of gas in Oakland is the same as a gallon of gas in Omaha, that system relies on metric standards.

A gallon is officially defined as 3.78541 liters. So just below the surface, it's all metric. It's metric all the way down. You might think the debate about the metric system is over in the US, but a candidate in the most recent Democratic primary actually ran on a pro-metric platform. Spoiler alert, he did not get very far.

More about that after this. In June 2015, Lincoln Chafey, the former governor of Rhode Island, announced that he was seeking the Democratic nomination for president. He said he would be running on a platform of bold ideas, like this one. Earlier, I said, let's be bold. Here's a bold embrace of internationalism. Let's join the rest of the world and go metric.

I happen to live in Canada, and they completed the process. Believe me, it's easy. It doesn't take long before 34 degrees is hot. Only Myanmar. J.F.E ended up dropping out just four months later. He didn't do well in the debates and he wasn't raising much money and his poll numbers were low. It's like he just did not quite have his finger on the pulse of the nation. Here's Stephen Mem talking with Joel again.

You know, his first order of business was to make the metric system, are we going to do measurement? It just became like really like that, that was just laughable, you know. He wasn't really reading every national tone, right? Was he? No, exactly, exactly. That was not part of Make America Great again. You know quote unquote. This episode was produced in collaboration with Joel Werner. He's the creator and host of a new

podcast from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation called Some of All Parts. It tells stories about numbers, measurements, and data. Check it out and if you have a story that somehow involves a number, email the show at soapatabc.net.au. For my team Delaney Hall edited this piece and Sheree Fusif did the tech production and mix. Sean Real composed the music. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. Kurt Colstead is the digital director.

The rest of staff includes Avery Trollman and at the Cheryl, Terran Mazza and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of visible is part of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by the Night Foundation and Coin Carrying listeners, just like you.

You can find 99% invisible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Ork. Run Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. If you want to read an article about the oldest national monuments in the U.S. or any of the other design stories that we release every single week, you have to go to our website, it's 99p i dot org. Radio tapio. From PRX. you