The Odd Clauses by Jay Wexler Read Free Book Online Page B

feet deep, must be described as follows: 7 metres, 6 decimetres, and 2 centimetres front, by 30 metres, 4 decimetres, and 8 centimetres deep. Thus, the description of every such lot will require three different units and six words, instead of one unit and two words.” Notice how deceptively absurd it was for the report writers to choose simple numbers from the US system instead of from the metric system; if the lot instead happened to be 30 meters by 10 meters, we would have to say that it was 98 feet and 5.102362204724159 inches by 32 feet and 9.700787401574757 inches. Not so simple anymore, eh? Finally, according to the report, the “base” measurements of the metric system are problematic, either because, like the meter, they are too big, or, like the gram, they are too small, as the authors explain using the example of an absolutely enormous steak dinner: “Hence the weights of all common articles are expressed in very large numbers. For example, a piece of beef, for dinner, which we designate by the modest number, 14 pounds, would have its weight expressed by 6,356 grammes.” Oh, heavens! Can you imagine what a nightmare it would be to live in such a world?
    The authors also totally unload on the meter. Not only is it too big, but it is also a “fact well known to all men of science”that the meter is “neither a true nor an accepted standard.” At the time, the meter was defined by reference to the earth’s circumference; specifically, it was defined as being equal to 1/10,000,000 of the distance around the earth of the longitudinal line passing through Barcelona and Dunkirk. Admittedly, that does seem a little more complicated than the average length of a human foot, but the authors of the report go further to criticize the “choice made of the circumference of the meridional or generating ellipse of the terrestrial spheroid, in preference to its axis of revolution,” which they contend makes the meter a “sin against geometrical simplicity.”
    Now, I don’t have any idea what any of that means, but I do wonder whether the authors of the report would think differently now that the meter is defined not in terms of the earth’s circumference but rather as the distance traveled by light in 1/299,792,458th of a second. My guess is that the change wouldn’t have much impressed those grumpy old guys, but apparently the measurement is incredibly precise and stable. Maybe the authors of the report would have turned their ire instead upon the kilogram, which is defined by a platinum-iridium cylinder crafted in 1889 and kept in a chateau outside Paris, where, much to the chagrin of French scientists, it is losing a tiny bit of weight every year.
    Skip ahead now approximately one hundred years. In the mid-1960s, England adopted the metric system, thus placing lots of pressure on the United States to do the same. In 1968 Congress authorized the National Bureau of Standards to undertake a three-year study on what should be done about the metric system in the United States. The bureau completed the study, and in a report entitled
A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come,
urged the country to begina ten-year conversion process to the new measurement system. Congress didn’t quite follow the bureau’s advice, however. It passed a law called the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, which came far short of initiating any sort of obligatory conversion to metric. Although Congress recognized that the United States “is the only industrially developed nation which has not established a national policy of committing itself . . . to the metric system,” and declared in Section 2 of the act that the “policy of the United States shall be to coordinate and plan the increasing use of the metric system,” the law did not mandate that anyone at all had to start using the metric system or even to start thinking about maybe using the metric system