2002 February 7
I just received this note from R. Schulte, President of ASTM.
At one time I was employed in the gas utility industry. I related to you the
difficulties that this one business sector, the natural gas and propane
distribution industry, faces in moving to the use of SI units. Gas utilities
in the U.S. are delivering fuel to an estimated 200 million gas-fired
appliances installed in residences and commercial buildings. The industry
has not been able to figure out how it could switch pipe and thread sizes to
metric units without introducing large gas leak (safety) problems into the
gas distribution networks where service and installation technicians would be
dealing with a mix of metric and IP threads. This one, narrow example has
led me to understand why the adoption of metric units in ASTM standards
remains a committee-by-commitee and sector-by-sector issue.
At the same time, parts of the gas industry have learned the value of metric
unit measurement. Maybe five years back, I had the experience of visiting an
appliance production plant where they faced a shortage of trained production
workers. The company, therefore, was hiring new staff and putting them
through an in-plant education program. The company quickly discovered that
their new employees were available in the labor market, in part, because they
lacked math skills. Some new employees could not manipulate fractions at
all. The company, therefore, adopted the strategy of teaching production
line workers measurement methods based on metric units that were seen as
easier to use than IP units. This meant, in effect, that the company ended
up making some appliance components for an inch-pound market using metric
measurement tools and methods in the plant. This example suggests to me that
U.S. industry is not unaware of the value of metric measurement; we just
haven't found a good place to make the introduction of SI units in an
economical and safe manner.
Robert Bushnell
