John Bemelmans Marciano

A decent, interesting narrative history of the metric system, it's adoption by most of the world, and its rejection (mostly) by the United States of America. But, along with the metric system, it talks about time zones, clocks, calendar reform, coinage, and a whole host of other utopian and unifying schemes mostly dreamed up by dreamy-eyed progressive idealists.

Marciano explains some of the usefulness and utility of the old way of doing things with its 16s, 12s, 8s, 4s, 3s, and 2s and its ½, ¾, ¼, ⅛, et cetera. He explains some of the idiocy of the 10s of metric. So what 10 cm is 1 dm. Nobody uses decimeters, or dekameters, much less megameters or femtometers, or megagrams, or femtograms, or whatever.

And, the British still have their pints of beer. God bless 'em. Oh God, it bothers me that good ol' American bourbon comes in 750 ml bottles.... By God! American whiskey should be sold in fifths. (A fifth of a US liquid gallon, or 25 3⁄5 US fluid ounces.) They are cheating you out of 7 ml of whiskey! And, please, please, please, people, stop calling U.S. measurements "imperial." They ain't the same.

Anyway. It's a good book, well-researched and well-written. A dumb error in Appendix A (p. 269) makes you worry about the rest of the book: a ton is not 1000 lb., it is 2000 lbs.

I will finish with a nice paean to America's continued use of the good old measures (p. 267), which sums up everything nicely:

"But when it comes to how our measures do matter, the important thing about keeping them alive is that they provide an alternate way of thinking. The usefulness of the metric system doesn't change the fact that it is incredibly artificial. Worse, its universality leads to the notion that decimals are the only way of perceiving the world.

"In the Babylonian sixtieths, Roman twelfths, and medieval halves, quarters, and eighths there is the logic and genius of countless generations of people coming to grasp the world around them, the same way there is logic and genius in the Enlightenment tenths, hundredths, and thousandths of the metric system. What is good about the latter does not negate what is good about the former.

"Such arguments are taken as self-evident when it comes to vanishing languages or other living heritages that are endangered. America is preserving ways of thinking that were once common to all humanity, and if we get rid of our measures we will never bring them back. To be for a metric America is to be for a global monoculture.

"So how is it that those who cheer José Bove's smashing of a McDonald's and blame the United States for the Coca-Colanization of the planet would want this to happen? How can Americans be stupid, ignorant, and lazy for knowing only one language, and also be those same things for having two systems of measurement? It is because not being metric plays into the idea that America thinks of itself as not having to play by the same rules as the rest of the world. This may be a fair enough criticism in other cases, but not this one.

"America has never gone metric because it never had to, and every other country did. Most of them converted while undergoing regime changes, industrializing, and trying to make their people literate and numerate. It used to be that diversity was the enemy of a better life; we now live in an age where the villain has become uniformity."

Huzzah the old measures. Down with the metric system!… (meer)