----- Original Message ----- From: "Pat Naughtin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, May 28, 2005 3:15 PM Subject: [USMA:32957] Use of millimetres
<snip> > > On the other hand, the choice of centimetres in the textile industry gave no > such clear advantage to textile and clothing workers. The halves and > quarters formerly applied to inches were simply transferred to half > centimetres and quarter centimetres. In addition, as a further impediment, > textile and clothing workers had the added disadvantages of decimal > fractions of centimetres (which they had never used before) and, even worse, > all the problems of converting between decimal centimetres and fractions of > inches to suit their large stock of old patterns. It's no wonder that they > have almost universally chosen to revert to inches and fractions of inches > because they believe that they understand them better than this (to quote a > shirt maker) 'new metric muck'. > I can see Pat's point. I, too, at first thought that using such a small submultiple of the meter as the millimeter would create cumbersomely large numbers. However, I can see the the opportunity to use whole numbers is a very powerful advantage. In effect, the barrier of dealing with subdivisions of the unit of measure is avoided, and it helps break the old habits of using ordinary fractions to describe length (like one and a half centimeters). I suspect that Pat is correct in observing that the textile and clothing workers would have become fully metric ages ago if they had gone over to millimeters. It may not be as elegant as using the nearest submultiple to allow for a single digit to the left of the decimal point and not as much evidence of one's facility with metric prefixes by moving decimal points and swapping prefixes, but it does prevent a strong psychological push out of Imperial and into metric usage. (In any case, it's clear humans prefer convention usage with respect to a single well understood organizing unit, which explains why people in countries that have been metric for more than a century regulary talk about "thousands of kilometers" instead of "megameters".) Pat, any chance of getting the textile and clothing workers to switch at this late date to millimeters?
