Bruce Olson writes: | John Chambers wrote: | > There was a rather funny NRP article in the late 80's about the | > non-celebration of the 100th anniversary of the US "going metric". | > They explained what they meant by this, of course, and in the process | > explained a lot about the peculiar understanding of the term | > "standard" in this country. It seems that, since the late 1880s, the | > legal US definition of the inch is 2.54 cm. That's exact, because it | > actually is the definition of "inch". Similarly, "pound" is defined | > as so many grams, and so on with other measurements. | | I don't think that is quite right. My recollection is that | 39.37 inches was one meter until some time in the 1970s. | | I was one of many scientists at the US National Bureau of | Standards who was appalled, to say the least, when the US | government decided to abandon their highly publicized campaign to | convert to metric. Much had already been done, at no small | expense, and had to be abandoned for an expensive reconversion | back to 'English' units [e.g., all the new gasoline/petrol pumps that | delivered in liters had to be abandoned, and old (US) gallon pumps | reinstalled].
Actually, part of the NPR article was a curious fact that lots of legal types have also pointed out: The US actually has no legally required system of measurement, except for a very few specific products. What the NBS (or NIST or whatever they're called this month) does is provide legal definitions of measurements. They in effect say "If you measure something in inches, you mush use this definition of an inch. But if you measure it in, say, attoparsecs, this is the definition of a parsec (and of the atto- prefix)." The claim that the US had "gone metric" in the 1880's was shorthand for a more complex thing: The NBS redefined a whole lot of units of measurement in terms of the "metric" standards in Paris. They did this because they decided that those were the best-calibrated units at the time. Americans were still free to use whatever godawful units they liked; the NBS merely defined those units in metric terms. Funny thing is that in recent years, they have abandoned any such calibrated units for most measurements. Units of time, length, voltage, etc. are now defined in terms such as the wavelength of a specific spectral line in a specific isotope. So you don't have to depend on a physical copy of a physical object halfway around the world; you can determine the units in the privacy of your own lab. In most of the world, this is now the situation. So the US abandoned the metric system in the 70's, in the same sense that it was adopted in the 1880's. And it had no real effect on anything outside a few labs. I can't think of a way to make a funny tie-in to music for this now. Maybe someone else can. Something along the lines of how we no longer need to calibrate our instruments to any mundane physical objects in this world; we can align our music with the very basic phenomena of the cosmos. But there's gotta be a better (i.e., funnier) way to express the idea ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
