Measuring Things

I read once that Thomas Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to get the new United States to adopt a kind decimal measuring system. And I recall that, during Lincoln’s presidency, the US Congress passed a law or resolution making the metric system the official measurements of the country. That didn’t seem to take either.

Here in the UK, the business of measuring stuff is a bit different. We have a nice little Skoda Fabia car with a trip computer that calculates, among other things, the average fuel consumption while you’re driving along. I have a lot of fun with this trying to get the most economy from the car. This statistic is displayed in miles-per-gallon. That’s fine with me; I’ve used that measure of fuel economy for most of my life. However, gasoline/petrol is sold here by the litre, so it’s pretty difficult to calculate the cost of driving the car. All our road signs are in miles to the next place of interest. Speed limits are posed in miles-per-hour.

Some years ago, the British government was required under prevailing EU treaties to enact regulations mandating that things would be sold in metric measures. But, they negotiated a couple of exceptions: milk and beer would still be sold in multiples of pints. Now in most shops and supermarkets everything is labelled with both metric and imperial weights and measures.

For a while, the BBC weather forecasters were moving away from reporting temperature in Fahrenheit degrees and rainfall in inches. These days, they report temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius degrees and rain comes in inches as well as millimetres.

That reminds me of another curiosity: in Britain there are no centimetres. Everything is measured in millimetres. I wonder if there isn’t a little know government department somewhere that has responsibility for deciding what measurements we use. And the civil servants in this department don’t think that Brits are capable of understanding that centimetres are ten times as big as millimetres and metres are one hundred centimetres long.

By the way, I weigh 95 kilos or about fifteen stone.