Still a Matter of Inches

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 24, 2001 | by Erin Condon

Despite the efforts of Congress and the trade practices of U.S. firms doing business overseas, the metric system doesn't measure up to English units for the American public.

How far is 40 kilometers? (Answer: 24.8 miles.) How many liters of gasoline will fill your car's tank? (Approximately 40 to 50.) What do you wear when the thermometer reads 19 degrees Celsius? (Since it is 48 degrees F, how about a light jacket?) But who really cares. Apparently Americans don't.

Thirty years ago, Congress tried to convert this nation of rebels to the metric system, claiming that an interdependent world market required it and that our economic survival depended upon it. But when the contemplated change began to take the form of metric highway signs, gas pumps and thermometers, Americans demanded and received the return of their familiar English units. Congressional efforts to promote conversion only invoked fear and hostility.

"The mistake was made in trying to do that before having a public-awareness campaign," says Gerard Iannelli, director of the U.S. Metric Program, a project of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Iannelli tells Insight that America's rejection of the metric system is "a perceptual problem." Americans were asked to forget their familiar measurements and adhere to a foreign system without enough social engineering. "I really think we should wait until people begin to think in the language" before converting traffic signs, weather reports and supermarket scales, Iannelli says.

But Seaver Leslie, chairman of Americans for Customary Weight and Measure (ACWM), attributes the resistance to the national psychology. "We're a very practical, independent-minded nation," he says. By rejecting the metric system Americans are "celebrating the poetry, practicality and accuracy" of our superior English units. He views metric proponents as "profiteers" introducing new units of measurement that "do not work" and require highly expensive changes from which special interests will profit. "If industry and manufacturers want [metric]," Leslie says, "that's fine. But don't force it on people."

To many Americans, the passage of the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 signaled the nation's abandonment of English measurements. As a woman recently put it to Iannelli, "When I was teaching in the seventies, I thought it was going to take over." The act "declared that the policy of the United States shall be to coordinate and plan the increasing use of the metric system in the United States and to establish a United States Metric Board to coordinate the voluntary conversion to the metric system." In other words, this "voluntary" change would by force of law bring the U.S. system of measurement into line. Congress supplied the Metric Board with approximately $2 million every year until it was disbanded.

But not only did Americans viscerally reject conversion to the metric system -- it developed that there was to be a hefty price tag they were unwilling to pay. According to a 1978 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), "Some of the major cost areas include training and educating people; converting computer systems, data bases, and standards; changing laws, regulations, ordinances, and codes; maintaining dual inventories; purchasing hand tools; changing product sizes; and familiarizing consumers with metric terms." The National Bureau of Standards predicted that conversion would cost $60 billion. Some estimates put the figure at $200 billion.

Service stations spent between $50 and $200 to convert a single gas pump from gallons to liters. Twenty states engaged in the initial stages of a $420 million conversion project, replacing their highway signs at approximately $56 each. But Americans soon were saying "no" to kilometer road signs, sales of gasoline in liters and Celsius temperatures. Citizens boycotted metric products and service stations and wrote their representatives in Congress to demand an end to the Federal Highway Administration plan to convert signage and maps to foreign units. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan disbanded the U.S. Metric Board. "It wasn't working," says Iannelli, who says he heard the demise of the board resulted from internal division and an inability to advance the objective.

But Congress, undaunted by the wasted funds and still determined to push the metric system, amended the Metric Conversion Act in 1988 "to designate the metric system of measurement as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce." It also required federal agencies to "use the metric system of measurement in its procurements, grants and other business-related activities, except to the extent that such use is impractical or is likely to cause significant inefficiencies or loss of markets to United States firms."

Three years later, with metric conversion still moving slowly, President George H.W. Bush issued an executive order that arranged for the secretary of commerce to "direct and coordinate efforts by federal departments and agencies to implement government metric usage ... by Nov. 30, 1991."