In his October 2002 New Yorker article on metric, David Owen comments:
"...the same urge for consistency at any cost is often evident among wholly
rational metric advocates, who seldom acknowledge thta there could be
situations in which coldly logical metric units work less well than quirkier
alternatives. An example is carpentry. The units in which American building
materials are idiosyncratic in the extreme---they include gauges, penny
sizes, nominal dimensions, and a host of other anachronistic
absurdities00but the over-all system works well, in part because it arose
organically from human activity instead of being imposed from above by
theoreticians. The standard metric measuring tape was clearly not designed
by anyone who regularly worked with wood: a millimetre is smaller thant he
tip of a builder's pencil and narrower than the blade of a saw, and the
closely packed, uniform gradations on the tape are hard to make out at a
glance except in bundles of five. In contrast, a customary American
tape--with its easily distinguishable divisions of sixteenths, eighths,
quarters, halves, inches, feet, and sixteen-inch framing intervals---is
harmoniously suited to the way in which it is used. The American building
industry will probably adopt the metric system someday, but American
carpenters are not idiots or Luddites for continuing to use a system that
works."
I want to defer to subscribers to this list who are outside the United
States, especially Canada and Australia. What was the reaction of carpenters
to metrication? To what extent do they agree or disagree with Mr. Owen?
Paul Trusten, R.Ph.
3609 Caldera Boulevard Apartment 122
Midland TX 79707-2872 USA
432-694-6208
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"There are two cardinal sins, from which
all the others spring: impatience and laziness."
---Franz Kafka
