John Chambers wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
--
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