Comments on: Metric System

By: melinda

melinda — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:00:43 +0000

I was born in 1957, which means I attended school starting in 1962. I remember being in grade school ((1962-68) and being told we were switching to the metric system, I’m guessing about 1966. We had a special teacher come to our classroom for a little while everyday. I felt like we were being re-programed, because we had already been taught the IMPERIAL SYSTEM (I didn’t even know it was called that) but I liked it! All of a sudden it stopped! We didn’t learn anything, it hadn’t been long enough. I remember my mother saying that THEY decided not to switch to the metric system.
To be honest most Americans only use the metric system when someone needs a 2 liter bottle of pop picked up from the store. Isn’t that sad!

By: chriswaugh_bj

chriswaugh_bj — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:05:38 +0000

Liberia? Really? Still, they have been rather busy with other things these last few years. Can’t really blame them for not finding the time to update their measurements.

Oh, and a new colleague, an American, told me a few days ago that America is officially metric, the conversion happened back in the 60s or 70s, but nobody paid any attention to the new law and just kept using imperial. Don’t know how much truth there is to that, but it was interesting to hear.

By: David Jorm

David Jorm — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:02:08 +0000

You forget the grand nation of Liberia, which to this day also uses the imperial system!

By: chriswaugh_bj

chriswaugh_bj — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:13:58 +0000

“Go metric!”

Amen! It’s long since time you Yanks caught up with the rest of the world. Shit, even the Poms have managed to metricate.

What’s funny, though, is just how many generations it takes to get imperial out of the system. I’m sure you’re reasonably familiar with traditional Chinese measurements and can match them- at least with as much difficulty as I can (and it takes me some mental gymnastics)- with their metric equivalents. Same thing for NZ. We metricated in the 60s, but even in the 80s my mum would send me down to the dairy (corner store/convenience store) for a pound of butter, and I’d run off and buy 500 grams of butter. Or a pint of milk which was actually a 600 ml bottle. And my height and weight were metric at school and imperial (British style- we use stones, and our gallons are different) at home. I don’t know about Kiwi kids these days, but certainly my generation is equally conversant in both (but with differences among individuals- I much prefer metric, but others my age may be more comfortable with imperial, but nevertheless, we communicate).

And to this day the weight of newborn babies in NZ is given in both kgs and pounds/ounces.

But somehow temperature is the big non-converter. Even my grandparents would always talk celsius/centigrade. The few occasions I lived in a flat equipped with a 60s-era oven that still had the temperature marked in fahrenheit, it took several failed attempts at baking or roasting followed by a desperate dig through cookbooks to find a conversion scale before anybody could use the bloody thing.

Oh, and although America tries to pretend otherwise, there’s a difference between metre and meter. Metre is the basic unit of length, meter is an instrument used to measure. A micrometre is one millionth of a metre; a micrometer is an instrument used to measure lengths on roughly that scale, just as a voltmeter measures voltage.