Metric Sunk on the High Seas

Article by Skip Johnson

From my earliest days I measured length, weight and volume with feet, inches, yards, miles, pounds, ounces, tons, pints, quarts, gallons and so on. I learned early on that most of the world used a different system with meters, grams and liters—a somewhat shorter list. But I was educated and operated in the feet, pounds and gallons universe.

Didn’t think much about it for many years until I started using a little shareware program called Michlet, that was strictly metric. The program was not particularly user-friendly, but was powerful in providing solutions to problems I was quite interested in. Translating from one system to another and then back again was tedious but necessary.

An answer in meters per second meant nothing to me—I need to know what it was in miles per hour or feet per second. Intellectually I knew that the metric system was better in many respects, but learning a new language late in life was difficult and I’d never be quite as proficient in the later system. I will say I now think quite well “metrically” within a 220 x 220 x 240 millimeter cube since I got a 3D printer.

The reason I write this now is I recently read that Thomas Jefferson was intrigued with this new measuring system and dispatched an envoy to France to bring back samples of this new standard. Unfortunately the envoy’s ship was captured by pirates on the return voyage and the envoy perished in captivity. Damn you pirates. •SCA•