David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published May 4, 2004

Sure metric is goofy, but it's not as goofy as what we use

When I was an elementary school lad of the late 1970s, my teachers insisted that we kids needed to know the metric system. The rest of the world had already adopted the metric system, and any day now (well, then) the United States was going to see the error of its ways -- perhaps even as soon as 1985. By then I'd be a slightly older lad of 15 with an eye toward a driver's license learning permit and thoughts of cruising around town at a leisurely speed of 50 kilometers an hour.

Well, 1985 has long since come and gone, and we Americans still haven't bothered to switch to the world's standard. Maybe in elementary school I could have told you how fast 50 kilometers an hour was, but today I have no idea. I'm not even sure if I'd get a ticket in a school zone for driving 50 kilometers an hour.

While I'm as patriotic and loyal as the next guy, I'm quick to admit that the U.S. system of measurement is downright messy. How many meters are in a kilometer? One thousand -- it's a nice, neat, easy-to-remember figure. How many feet are in a mile? A cumbersome 5,280 -- yuck! No wonder Americans speed so much. We have no idea how much ground we're actually covering.

The basis of the metric distances is the meter, which is officially defined by a platinum pole locked away somewhere in France. Pretty arbitrary, I'll grant you, but not nearly as arbitrary as our foot, which isn't even the measure of somebody's foot. According to Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts, a foot refers to the arm of England's King Henry I. Merry Ole Henry had an arm 36 inches long, and he decreed that the kingdom's official measurement would be one-third the length of his arm. How's that for royal arrogance?

The king may be turning in his grave today, though. England officially adopted the metric system in 1975, but King Henry's foot (uh, arm) is alive and well and living in the United States.

The foot issue is odd enough, but when you consider that we Americans weigh material in units called "ounces" and at the same time measure liquid in units called "fluid ounces," it's a wonder our heads haven't imploded from the madness of it all. Before I was in elementary school trying to grasp metric conversion scales, I was an even younger lad of 7 who noticed that a 16-ounce soda and 16-ounce loaf of bread didn't weigh the same. It took me years to understand the difference. To this day I often think about drinking a pound of soda when I chug a 16-ounce Coke. It's a good thing I switched to Diet Coke years ago. Six or seven pounds of Coke a day is bound to cause health problems.

But some things are just plain odd in the United States, England, Zaire, Australia, everywhere. One day I learned that a circle has 360 degrees and that the Earth orbits the Sun in an ellipse (a circle's ugly cousin, but it still has 360 degrees). So why doesn't a year have 360 days instead of 365 or, worse still, 366 days? Doesn't it feel right that a unit of time based on the circle's ugly cousin should be divided into 360 days? The problem is that the Earth rotates every 24 hours. Silly planet, messing up our calendar. We can't even blame American stubbornness on it.

Will the United States ever drop its archaic system of weights and measures? Who knows. We can be pretty arrogant when it comes to that sort of thing. If we ever feel in danger of being toppled as the world's foremost economic superpower, you can bet that changes will be made. It's not a huge problem converting pounds to kilograms and selling our wares to the world market, but if the economic gap closes in on us, I suspect America will then feel the 100-degree Celsius heat of other countries breathing down our neck.

Plus, it would give my fourth-grade teacher a small sense of satisfaction in knowing that she was right. Sure, she will have been a few decades off in her prediction, but the metric system will have won.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.