Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Why Doesn't the US Use the Metric System?

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Of the 193 countries in the United Nations, exactly three haven’t adopted the widespread use of the metric system: Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States of America. Of those three, the US is the country that really stands out. It has the biggest economy in the world, does an incredible amount of international trade, and has immigrants from every country in the world If there was one country on paper that should be using the metric system, it is the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of the 193 countries in the United Nations, exactly three haven't adopted the widespread use of the metric system. Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States of America. Of those three, the U.S. is the country that really stands out. It has the biggest economy in the world, does an incredible amount of international trade, has immigrants from every country, and is even the home to the United Nations. If there was one country on paper that should be using the metric system, it's the United States. Yet, we don't. Find out why America, America.

are still stuck using feet and inches on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is brought to you by audible.com. If you like to listen to audio content while you go about your day, and if you're listening to this, you clearly must, then I'd definitely check out Audible selection of audiobooks. If you happen to find today's topic interesting, I'd suggest the title, Whatever Happened to the Metric System, by John Bellamins Marciano. He gives a far deeper dive into the history of America and our flirtation with the metric system. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to

audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere or by clicking on the link in the show notes. The story of the United States and the metric system goes back to the beginning of the country. Establishing a system of weights and measures is actually written into the U.S. Constitution in Article 1, Section 8, where it says Congress shall have the power to fix standards of weights and measures. The U.S. Constitution was written in 1788, and the Measures. measurement system we call the metric system was created right around that time in France. The problem was it wasn't exactly at the same time, and when the U.S. first started looking for a system, the metric system didn't exist. Establishing a system of measurement was actually one of the

very first things the United States government said about doing. It was in Washington's very first state of the union address, as well as his second and third. The very first Congress in 1789 created a committee to look into the matter, and in 1790, the committee led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson issued the report called a plan for establishing uniformity in the coinage, weights, and measure of the United States. There was an assumption among most early Americans that some sort of decimal system would be what the country would use. The United States had just agreed to a decimal currency a few years earlier in 1785, and decimalization was just the modern thing to do.

The Jefferson Plan put forward the first decimal system of measurement in world history. Jefferson's system used traditional English measurement names like feet, ounce, and bushel. It also had values for each measurement which were close to the traditional unit. For example, the foot would be the basic unit of length. An inch would be one-tenth of a foot. A line would be one-tenth of an inch, and a point would be one-tenth of a line. Going the other way, a decad would be ten feet, a rude would be a hundred feet, a furlong would be a thousand feet, and a mile would be ten thousand feet.

Likewise, the volume of a bushel would be defined as a cubic foot, and the weight of an ounce would be defined as the weight of one cubic inch of water. If this system sounds sort of metricy, you're right. Jefferson was a huge Francophile and spent a lot of time in France talking over ideas with the French intelligentsia. It's not surprising that his system, save for the names of the units, was so similar to the French system. It isn't hard to think of some sort of alternate reality, where the American decimalized system of feet, ounces, and bushels got adopted by the British, spread throughout the empire, then the world, and today I'm sitting here doing a podcast about why the French don't use the American decimal system of measurement. But that didn't happen. Jefferson's plan had bipartisan support from his allies like James Madison and James Monroe, as well as his political opponents like Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. In 1791, the Senate created their own committee, and in 1792, they voted unanimously to support the Jefferson plan. With the president, both houses of Congress, and most major figures in the government supporting the proposal, what happened?

Jefferson had been talking to people in France about developing standards for the new system which could be used globally. They had agreed upon defining a meter as the length of a pendulum with a total period of two seconds, one swing each way, at 45, degrees latitude. That would be the new yard in the Jefferson system, which would be the exact same thing as the length of a meter, just with a different name. The foot in the Jeffersonian system would be one-third of a meter slash yard. This pendulum basis for length had an international agreement, but then the French Academy of Science decided to go their own way and picked one ten millionth the distance from the North Pole to the equator through the Paris Meridian as the basis for the meter. This derailed the entire effort of trying to,

to create an international system in the late 18th century. As Jefferson later wrote in his memoirs, quote, the element of measure adopted by the National Assembly excludes ipso facto, every nation on earth from a communion of measurement with them, unquote. This delayed the United States acting. In 1795, Congress passed an act to adopt Jefferson's plan, and on the last day of the session, the Senate said they would take it up in the next session, and they never did. Congress's attention was taken up by the Northwest Indian Ward, what is today Ohio, the subsequent land rush and the need for surveying, and nothing ever happened. In fact, it was from this need for surveying that the first ever unit of measurement was passed by Congress, the chain, which is 66 feet. In 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams did a review of the current measurement system used in the states,

and determined that the customary units currently in place were sufficiently uniform and there was no need for change. Fast forward to 1875. The French system of measurement, at this time, being the only real decimalized system of measurement since the American plan was never adopted, was gaining in popularity. A convention was convened in Paris, and a treaty was signed among 12 countries, called the Meter Treaty. This treaty established the unit of mass and length, and it also created the International Bureau of Wights and Measures, which would be the governing body for this new system.

Guess who is one of the 12 original signatories of the treaty? You guessed it, the United States. In fact, the United States remains a member of the International Committee for Wights and measures to this day. In fact, the American system of feet, pounds, and gallons is defined by the metric system. Whereas all the metric units have values based on some natural measurement, which is a great topic for another episode, all the imperial units are defined in terms of their metric counterparts.

Moreover, most Americans are unaware that the metric system, due to our signing the meter treaty and a law passed in 1866 is fully legal in the United States and can be used for any contractual and legal purpose. In 1968, Congress released a report titled A Metric America, a decision whose time has come. And in 1975, Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act, which was to coordinate and plan the increasing use of the metric system in the United States. The plan was to phase in the metric system over a 10-year period. For those of us who remember the 1970s, we might recall some of the metric efforts which were in place at the time. For example, on September 17, 1977, Carleton College and St. Olaf College in Minnesota played the first and only metric American

football game. The field was 100 meters by 50 meters, and they received special permission from the NCAA. The problem was the conversion was entirely voluntary. If people didn't need to change, there was no real incentive to do so. The expense of changing signs and measurements wasn't worth it for most businesses, so it just never happened. The metric system in the U.S. is a lot like going to the gym. We all know we should do it, and eventually we'll get around to it, but we just never do. It primarily has to do with costs and benefits. The United States is a big country and the world's biggest economy. The current system works. Unlike smaller countries that may have a greater need to be in step with the rest of the world, the U.S. is the one country that can get away with having

a different system. The vast majority of things where people need to deal with measurements are not international. You go between towns, you fill up your car, you buy food. All of these things do not require any sort of international agreement. However, if we were to do a hard transition to metric, it would cost a lot of money. The majority of road signs would need to be replaced, as would all the labels, packaging, legal titles to land, and a host of other things we probably can't even think of. It is perhaps more helpful to think of going metric as being on a continuum rather than being binary. Despite the three countries I listed in the introduction of this episode. The truth is, there are a lot more countries that use non-metric units in daily life.

In Canada, most people would give their weight in pounds and their height in feet and inches, and floor space and apartments is given in square feet. In the United Kingdom, roads are still measured in miles, and weight is given in stone, and no one really knows what a stone is. Gallons are still used in many Central American countries, but only for the sale of gasoline. The United States is just on the other end of the spectrum. We do use metric for, some things. You purchase soda by the leader and pharmaceuticals by the milligram. Pretty much all science in the United States is now done in metric. So a future Mars climate orbiter, which crashed in 1998 because of software programmed with non-metric units, probably

will never happen again. Pretty much every student in elementary school in the United States is exposed to the metric system. An estimated 30% of all products manufactured in the U.S. are in metric, as are many products by American companies manufactured overseas. However, things like distances between cities and the sale of gasoline don't really matter for dealing with the rest of the world. Americans use metric for things we need to use metric, and we don't for things we don't. There isn't really a movement to adopt the metric system in the U.S. It hasn't been a political issue for over 40 years. There's currently no call for the adoption of the metric system anywhere on the American political spectrum. There isn't even a movement in local communities to start moving

local measurements to metric. Absent some sort of sudden change in the political winds, the United States will probably remain a system which is mostly imperial units, but with a small growing number of things measured in metric. And besides, if we were to quickly change from pounds to kilograms, there would be mass confusion. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackle. Today's review comes from listener Sean G. exclamation point over an Apple podcast. He writes, love this new pod. If you like random facts, you'll love this podcast. In the matter of seven, eight minutes, it blows my mind every day. Thank you very much, Sean G. And thanks to all of you who've left reviews and to everyone who supports the show over on patreon.com, where I'm going

to be posting my very first patron-only show. It's going to be an update about the podcast and sort of some of what goes on behind it very, very soon.