On the occasion of Metric week I wrote the enclosed article for the monthly newsletter of the Knoxville Technical Society. It may be of interest to other members, especially also the book that inspired it, even if it is not metric friendly. Here it is.
Remember the Tenth of October - A note in the October 2003 newsletter The Soupcon of the Technical Society of Knoxville. It does not rhyme and it does not have the stuff of becoming a big hit. But 10/10 is Metric Day. A day that should remind Americans of an unfinished agenda. It is also not a very popular subject because it is one of failure. A missed opportunity of becoming a leader of nations in the field of measuring systems, which America could have become at the time when Thomas Jefferson developed and proposed a decimal system of measures for the nascent United States so that the common person who didn't have the educational background of knowing and converting among all the units being used in the market place could understand what the values and quantities were he was buying and selling. Then as now there were those who profited from the general confusion and felt that nothing was broke that needed to be fixed. For us today it is hard to understand that measures like the ell, the gallon or the bushel were different for buying and selling and for high- or low- worth goods. There was a lot of cheating going on and Jefferson wanted to clean up the mess before it spread over all the new states and before the population grew into the multimillions. George Washington, the first president of the republic, agreed with Jefferson that there was great urgency to introduce a nationwide system of measures. Jefferson had promoted his measuring system first as deputy from Virginia to the Continental Congress, and he continued to pursue it as American emissary to France and later as Secretary of State. He favored the length of a pendulum with the swing time of a second to define the unit of length and decimal multiples and subdivisions. But his system was still a far cry from what would become today's metric system that has strictly one unit for each quantity: for length the meter, for mass the kilogram, for energy the joule, for power the watt, and so on, all units derived from seven base units. Jefferson's system was more like a decimalized foot-inch, pound-ounze system. He proposed a foot having 10 inches, and 10 ft being a decade, and 10 decades a fathom and so on. The metric system had not been thought out as yet. Jefferson proposal only shows how far the metric system would have to go beyond the thinking of the time to evolve into today's International System of Units, the SI. The French metrication committee struggled over how the meter should be defined: as a part of the meridian or as the length of the second-pendulum. The final decision was in favor of the meridian. The committee members felt that more money could be made with measuring the meridian from Dunkerk to Barcelona via Paris than by experimenting with a swinging pendulum at some local latitude. There was a grain of sincerity in abandoning the pendulum. Monge, an ardent revolutionary who also worked on changing the time measuring system, did not want to tie the new meter to the soon to be abolished second of the ancien regime. This decision for the meridian pulled the bottom out from under Jefferson's effort to base the new metric foot on the second-pendulum The Jacobins were eager to get the new measurement system installed because cheating by a corrupt measuring system had long been a major complaint of the common people. Robespierre was advocating the metric system as a milestone of revolutionary progress and as a tool of education of the masses. He sent citizen Dombey, a renowned scientist, to America to personally deliver a prototype of the meter and the kilogram to the American Congress to let the Americans share in this accomplishment. Dombey traveled on an American ship that was intercepted in the Carribean near Guadeloupe by British privateers. Citizen Dombey was taken to Montserrat were he died in an English prison in 1794. The ship and its load including the metric prototypes were auctioned off in an American harbor. Congress never saw the items, but they finally made their way to NIST where they are today. A whole new world order was about to begin. The French came under Napoleon who started big continental wars, the British began flexing their world power muscle, and after a brief flare of measuring system reform in the American Congress in 1795, Americans went on with business as usual by dividing up their growing real estate by using Gunter's chain. Napoleon had initially supported the metric system but when his popularity declined, the French became increasingly restless with the metric system. They didn't want to pronounce the new words, like meter, kilo, centi, and so on, and more than ten years after its proclamation as the only legal system, the great leap backward occurred. Napoleon made a comprise between old and new by attaching old names to new metric units. But once decimals had been understood, everyone working with measures did not want to give them up. Even after Napoleon had been taken away and the restoration of the ancien regime tried to eradicate the vestiges of the revolution the metric system continued a shadow existence until its full acceptance in France in 1840. By the middle of the 19th century many European countries had adopted it. The Americans, even though they participated in the later developments of the metric system never managed to make the transfer. The development of chemistry and electricity convinced British scientists to use metric units in these new sciences and so the metric system slowly invaded the inch-pound world. The most important meridian had been laid through London-Greenwich instead of through Paris. An ultimate rehabilitation of the pendulum promoters of the late 18th century arrived in 1983 when wisdom's last conclusion defined the meter as the length of a light path in vacuum during a 1/299 792 458 fraction of a second. The second also had changed. It was no more the 86 400th part of the day but the duration of 9 192 631 770 cycles of cesium-133 radiation. Whatever the weird definitions of the base units of the metric system may be, it is its coherence (internal dependencies of all units on the seven base units), the decimality of the multiples and subdivisions of all units, and the principle of one unit for one quantity that makes the modern metric system superior to all other measuring systems in human history. This seemingly simple achievement required the contributions of the greatest minds of the waning 18th century, like Lagrange, de la Place, Borda, Lavoisier, Condorcet, Monge, and others, which indicates that what seems self-evident today presented enormous mental barriers 200 years ago. P.S. In a comment on this article by a member of the Technical Society of Knoxville, it was apparent that confusion may exist about the base unit of mass, which was claimed to be the gram. The base unit of mass is the kilogram and not the gram. It is deplorable that this oddity has persisted also in the SI, the modernized metric system that was introduced in 1960. All derived units that contain mass are formed with the kilogram. For example, force or weight, has the derived unit of kg m/s2 (newton), energy has the derived unit of kg m2/s2 (joule), and power has the derived unit of kg m2/s3 (watt). Multiples or fractions of the mass unit, however, are formed with the gram. For example, small masses may be measured in mg (milligram), large masses in Mg (megagram or ton), small concentrations in mug/m3 (microgram per cubicmeter), and so on. PS: This article was inspired by Andro Linklater's Measuring America, Walker Publishing Company, Inc., 2002, available at the local library.
