The Yardstick, number 1 (Autumn 1995)

Some articles from the first issue of the journal of the British Weights and Measures Association

METRICATION -- WHAT DO YOU KNOW?

by Arthur Whillock

There has long been a co-ordinated drive to force every constituent of our daily affairs into a decimal-metric form, regardless of need or the damage caused to the cultural structure and to understanding of the way things are best organised and described.

The attempt, in line with EU directives, to abolish almost all use of traditional British measures in the retail trade, as well as for government and social use, has brought about a keen awareness by the public of these changes. As Aristotle observed, "Some things are so obvious that they are never noticed" and one could add "or appreciated, until lost".

Resultant enquiries have necessitated a concise, non-technical, overall explanation of the issues at stake, and this we attempt here. It should be appreciated that the subject has many facets.

For commercial reasons a low-key decision was taken in 1965 that we should "go metric", and this was hardened into a White Paper in 1972 with a target date of 1975. This was before we joined the then European Community (the Common Market), which already had a directive that the latest version of the metric system, the Système International (SI), should be used throughout the Community by 1978. There was thus political pressure also, but the UK did negotiate a two-year reprieve which had extensions. Time has now run out. EEC directives, numbers 80/181/EEC OJ No. L39 and 89/617/EEC OJ No. 357 were implemented by domestic legislation ordering metrication of retail trade for packaged goods on 1 October 1995, and for all loose goods on 1 January 2000. It will then be illegal to sell goods using pounds and ounces on pain of a fine up to 5,000 pounds [sterling]. Apparently it will be allowable to sell a pound of something but only if designated as 453.6 grams, though this distinction does not seem to be widely understood.

Extensive discussions of details for SI appeared in the technical Press usually an indication that basic premises are faulty but rarely was any concern shown for the ordinary user. On the contrary, measures that had been determined by the limitations of human and animal power were used to denigrate all traditional units. This attitude ignores the fact that there are important traditional units, with their equivalents in all countries, which have evolved down the ages to be best suited to human physical needs, and which allow a meaningful perspective on the world around us and our dealings with it.

One of our tasks is to assure the public that naturally evolved measures are not so haphazard as we are led to believe and that they are more practical and truly scientific than the arbitrary, artificial arrangement now being imposed on us for little more than ignorant administrative tidiness. The foot has its equivalent world-wide by being a measure that can be perceived at handling distance without head movement. A pound has the right "heft", while the pint, before it was decimalised at twenty ounces instead of sixteen, was a pound of water a satisfying drink for quenching thirst.

For everyday use the metric system is an awkward combination of unergonomic units embedded into a rigid framework which allows no variation for practical uses. Simply by being a system, integrated into a numbering scale, metric measures have been adopted for scientific work, thus allowing an assumption that it is founded on scientific principles, which is far from being the case. Indeed, the needs of a scientific system were not, and in some ways could not have been, recognised at the time when the metric system was invented. Perversely, the metric system just fails to make important constants like the acceleration due to gravity or the velocity of light into whole numbers.

As at the start, decimal-metric methods are not so much favoured for their presumed scientific merits as for their appeal for administrative work, where pigeon-hole uniformity and the management of things take precedence. This attitude of mind is consistent with the tower-block and social engineering outlook on the management of people, which was finding favour here at much the same time as metrication.

Metrication has required compulsion in every country that has "adopted" it. Even at the start in France, Louis XVI was obliged while in prison to sign an order for the original survey. At a lower level it was an imprisonable offence to be caught dealing in dozens. To condition us gradually, we have had a "salami slice" approach, with a series of Statutory Instruments based on poorly debated "enabling legislation" passed twenty years ago and backed by legal sanctions for non-compliance. Education is the means whereby traditional measures are expected to be eliminated, the justification being extravagant claims of time saved by using metric units. However, recent reports conclude that even an understanding of the decimal principle is poor; children happily revert to whole numbers and simple fractions outside school. Public indifference to science, and aversion to it in schools, is largely due to its not being conducted in terms that are in accord with ordinary experience.

Many a so-called reform is often no more than a transfer of difficulties to those less capable of defending themselves, with beneficiaries claiming success. The conversion of our flexible denominations of money to a more rigid arrangement was to the disadvantage, and expense, of money users who have to carry around a greater number of coins. Fewer coins were required for payment and change with the former non-decimal divisions. In present postage stamp ranges there are difficulties in making up exact amounts from lower values. This shows the indifference to divisibility engendered by a decimal scale.

Metric transmogrifiers and their sycophants show no restraint in a desire to be fashionable, and for them nothing is venerable. The new rules of cricket define the pitch and equipment in metric terms. Splendid old machines in museums are inaptly labelled in rows of millimetres and metres, sometimes with the decimal point in the wrong place, though this hardly matters when all sense of the proportions to which the machines were built is effectively destroyed.

Displays in stately homes are strictly metricated. Surely the measures used in their construction are part of our heritage as well, but they are being extirpated as though they were dangerous thoughts. A side-effect is the aura of spurious precision engendered by numbers containing several decimal places and these can be quite out of place in ordinary use.

Traditional measures have a strong association with the culture in which they were established, and the right to determine and maintain them should be respected. They provide a cohesive force within their area of influence by providing agreement on the ways in which material things are described and organised. If the result of universal standardisation is a world where everywhere is alike, then nowhere will be worth visiting for the experience it offers.

Even our legal system can be affected. Due to an "unobserved" clause in a 1989 EU directive, which Britain was in due course told to implement, government administration had to be made metric. Heights of wanted persons stated in metres and centimetres (though the latter is not an approved SI unit) will mean little to most of us. Evidence in court or other proceedings will be rendered "unsafe". None of this is in the interest of justice but is an obstruction to it; metrication is presumably seen as more important.

With increasing complexity comes a declining understanding of the World and its attributes. Most people now live in ignorance of the processes on which they have become completely dependent. Metrication, with its effectively meaningless three-digit designations, does not conform to natural processes which proceed by twos, threes and fours. It is thus a further stage in our alienation from nature and reality.

Common measures, like common laws, provide safeguards against loss of liberties of thought and action by technical trickery. There is no reason why they cannot be retained for ordinary purposes alongside whatever artificial arrangement is in vogue for abstract needs. Electronic balances in stores can weigh out goods in pounds and ounces (division by sixteen is more natural for computerised equipment), and print out the bill in decimal (which is less natural), so there is no need for change.

All predictions of a regimented future assume complete decimal- metrication as a matter of course, complete with decimal time. In George Orwell's often quoted metric dystopia, 1984, the populace were kept in order by an elimination of any means whereby discontent could be expressed. Orwell uses the term "newspeak", whereby history was revised and only the latest diktat had any meaning. In reality in Britain now we have official "metrespeak" another way of twisting language to hide the truth and obscure our history. Adaptations of metric measures are made to suit practical needs. The metric foot of 30 cm, with its 25-mm inches, is the basis for hardware products. For Continental architecture, design modules of 120 cm and 90 cm (a metric yard) are used to obtain whole numbers for divisions. In Denmark a twelve-centimetre unit is favoured. If we adopt strict SI (the officially reformed metric system) for all purposes, we will be debarred from participating in such evasions on pain of a 5,000-pound [sterling] fine. Our bureaucrats seem to be more fanatically pro-metric than the rest of Europe.

A cunning ploy to counter popular resistance is a threat that we will be left behind in the race to metricate. In particular, it has been suggested that, if we do not hurry, America will "get there first". This is an alarmist ploy. Citizens in the various states of the USA are zealous of their rights (more so than we are of ours these days) and resent needless interference by the federal government. We can be confident that measurement of the people, by the people, for the people, will not vanish from the Earth.

It is recognised that an international system of measures is essential for world-wide exchange of information on scientific matters, and metric measures have acquired squatter's rights in this area for the time being. If the undoubted efforts expended on refining the metric system had worked with socially acceptable material, as was considered but unfortunately rejected at the start, we would now have a a set of measures that could provide a link between all levels of use. Instead metric measures are often a barrier to understanding for the ordinary person. Measurement should be made for man, not man for measurement.

VANDALISM MISTAKEN FOR PROGRESS

by Robert Carnaghan

Most people dislike metrication. In a survey by Gallup for the Daily Telegraph (9 September, 1995), the proportion approving of the change (37%) was almost exactly the same as thirty years ago, while the proportion opposed to change rose to 52% (thirty years ago it was 46%).

It is a reasonable conjecture that many of those in favour of change have been led by government propaganda to believe that the metric system is more rational and forward-looking. Many who accept the change probably do so because they feel that you can't, and shouldn't, stop progress. They have doubtless heard only one side of the case and never read the reasons for believing that metric units are in many ways inferior to imperial ones.

The metric system is supported by governments, with all their resources for promoting anything they want to spread. The Metrication Board used to attack imperial units and sing the praises of metric ones. Even now, government resources are being used to undermine our traditional units and spread the inferior ones.

Despite this, and years of metric teaching in schools, most people still think in natural units. The Gallup survey showed that 95% normally think in miles (3% in kilometres), 49% in Fahrenheit (44% in Celsius), 69% in yards (26% in metres), 87% in pounds (10% in kilos), and 87% in pints (10% in litres).

We are losing in the schools, and it seems that few parents make a conscious effort to pass yards, feet and inches on to their children, though doubtless there are a few who do. We urgently need suitable publications, explaining customary units and their merits, to inform and educate those who have been denied adequate knowledge of this aspect of our cultural tradition.

It is not so many years, here and on the Continent, since left- handed children were forced in most schools to write with the right hand, a policy which is now widely recognised to have been mistaken.

Earlier this century, Welsh and Gaelic-speaking children were often harshly punished for speaking their mother-tongue at school, even outside the classroom between lessons. Many Welsh-speaking parents were persuaded that theirs was a worthless language, and so they encouraged their children to know English alone rather than both Welsh and English. It is now widely acknowledged that there is nothing wrong with being bilingual (some believe it is an advantage), though it took a long time before this was recognised.

However, a similar mentality to that which lay behind such destructive coercion seems to be responsible now for the desire to eradicate conventional weights and measures and to force us all to fall in line with unnatural metric measures. By the time the mistake is realised, much damage will have been done to our way of life and sense of continuity over generations. There is all the more reason for those who understand these matters to seek to cultivate a justified sense of pride in our inheritance of practical units.

Some years ago the author of a French book on the metric system declared that the twin pillars of civilisation were the French language and the metric system! (This astonishing assertion was apparently tactfully omitted from the English translation.) While not responding in kind to such chauvinism, we could at least stop apologising for our weights and measures and start pointing out their practical merits.

Study our traditional units and their history, the better to defend them. Spread knowledge of the facts, and ensure as far as possible that young people have every chance to know about and to appreciate what is being taken by stages from us. We need to prepare for the time when realisation dawns that metrication was another mistake made in the name of progress.

Study the metric system and its history, the better to confound those who tell us to adopt it but who usually themselves know little about it, least of all its many disadvantages in use.

PAST ITS SELL-BY DATE

by Alan Lovegreen

The metric system of measurement, as applied to people's everyday lives, has passed its "sell-by" date.

Counting has been based on twos since pre-history and the binary system is now a "fast function" of almost all computers. The lineage through thousands of years has been smooth and unbroken. Nowadays computers manipulate strings of ones and zeros in groups of four, eight, sixteen and thirty-two together, millions of times a second; but this is no more than very fast counting in twos. Metrication, planted on this otherwise continuous progress, is merely a temporary aberration. It is now impeding the natural development of ways that humans count and measure, but mercifully the underlying binary method has gone on more or less unaffected.

The Indo-Aryans who migrated from central Asia to become the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans and Celts were organised into twelve tribes, had a pantheon of twelve gods, and counted to twelve on the finger knuckles. The foot of twelve thumb-widths developed in these ancient times, enabling artisans to measure accurately. Thus came about the half-inch, quarter, eighth, sixteenth and so on; all clearly visible.

The foot has been used by all races. It has been an English legal measure for no less than six hundred years. As the approximate length of a man's foot, it is also the base of the yard, measured from a man's nose to his extended arm's finger-tip, while the fathom of the inshore navigator is a man's full stretch between outstretched arms.

These measures and counting systems, related to the human body, needed no instrumentation. They have, of course, been precisely standardised over the generations.

But what of the metre? It has no ancestors and no future; no pedigree and no posterity. The metric system is entirely artificial and is being belatedly forced on the people of Britain whilst everywhere else it is in decline. Soon into the millennium it may well be relegated to serve only those purposes suitable to an arbitrary non-historic standard. The imperial and metric systems have coexisted in the modern era across the world because the metric system fails to offer any great advantage.

People are having to improvise their own standards all over Europe by cutting up the metre into three manageable lengths. So we have a unit of two "metric feet", which is then divided into 24 "metric inches" of 25 mm each … back, would you believe, to the 24 knuckles of the early Persian traders! So today in Italy dress-makers use a tape of two-centimetre pollici (singular pollice), a name derived from the Latin for "thumb".

What of the volume measures? Simple ones like ten litres cannot relate to the cube of an even number as can a cubit foot. One hundred litres is no better. 9 litres, or 16, or 25, 36 and so on, but never the metric round figures. The millilitre, of course, like the millimetre and gram, is far too small; each of them needs large numbers for any handy measure. No wonder that after less than two hundred years Continental Europeans are making the best of a bad job by chopping up and rebuilding the parts into more useful measures.

So what are we to do about this metrication which is so out of touch with the real world? We should get on with our lives and let metrication wither. Buy the things we have always bought by the pound and ounce, the foot and inch, the pint and gallon, and leave alone the pre-packed perishable stuff.

Play golf, tennis, cricket using clubs, racquets, bats graduated in pounds; lay out our ball games in yards, feet and inches … hold fast to what we know will survive and wait for the bureaucrats to catch up.

Whatever the UK government may dictate, the year will be divided into days by the movement of the Earth around the sun, the days into 24 hours of 60 minutes, each of 60 seconds, and distances over the globe in degrees, minutes and seconds of arc. Aircraft throughout the world will continue to fly nautical miles in heights of feet.

The general public can be very effective just as they were over the "poll tax" by simply rejecting these directives. When the national education budget is being squeezed, are we prepared to fund an army of inspectors to persecute and prosecute our traders for following sound, traditional measures? Are we prepared to see our markets worldwide, especially the U.S.A. and S.E. Asia, in goods made to imperial measures, lost to Continental countries that remain free to supply them with what they want?

The message must go out that, despite 1st October, the U.K. is still open for business as usual.

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