I am a child of the 1960s CE, and as such my formative years were dominated by various events in the British national life. These included the Three-Day Week, power cuts, the paper shortage, the summer of ’76, the Winter Of Discontent and the breakdown of the Post-War consensus. More globally, I can remember the Vietnam War, some of the Apollo missions and Watergate. All of those refer to US-dominated events of course. In terms of popular culture, I can recall a couple of Beatles songs, notably ‘The Long And Winding Road’, glam rock and the gradual rise in popularity of colour TV.
Most notably, though, for the purposes of this post, I can recall decimalisation and the drive to metrication in this country. Decimalisation was a very early memory for me. Decimal Day was on 15th February 1971. I remember the Max Bygraves song which nobody else seems to, for example. I don’t recall the likes of sixpences or threepenny bits in circulation although like anyone else of my age I clearly recall the use of shillings and florins because they were only withdrawn in 1993. Although there were many complaints, decimalisation has clearly been entirely successful, although the existence of the florin is evidence of an earlier effort to do so which didn’t work as well. It was part of a proposal made in 1847 to replace shillings and pence with units of a tenth and a hundredth of a pound, made by one Sir John Bowring, and was introduced to test public opinion. The words “dime” and “decade” were suggested as names, and it’s quite surprising that it ended up being called a florin, which was the name of a Dutch coin of about the same value at the time. A royal commission had been set up earlier in the 1840s to investigate the possibility of decimalisation. However, the idea had been floating around since the late seventeenth century. The first European decimal currency was the Russian ruble (рубль), introduced in 1704, and over the next couple of centuries many other countries decimalised. China had been using it for far longer. The UK was, unsurprisingly, a late adopter of a completely decimal currency, and I’m personally wondering if that’s connected to it being perceived as French because the Napoleon had made many other countries go decimal.
I’m actually not a fan of decimal currency as such. Neither am I a fan of currency with arbitrary divisions of different values. I recognise the value of having to convert such numbers mentally or on paper as a form of intellectual exercise, but also think this is outweighed by the slow pace of such conversions even in most practiced minds. But it makes a lot of sense that a crown can be divided fairly between two, three, four, six, a dozen, fifteen, thirty or sixty people in the old money, even more if ha’pennies and farthings are involved, whereas the modern decimal crown, should it be used as currency, can only be divided by five. There’s a sense of equity there which I regard as very positive. Hence the “old money” had its benefits but going on to impose twenty shillings to the pound the next step up whereas not exactly a mistake as the decision was probably never consciously made, is at least inconvenient and inconsistent. Only nostalgia can really be evoked as a reason to stick with it, or possibly a sense of national identity. However, it could’ve been the other way round as the first ideas of decimalisation in England arose in 1682, and we could have ended up as the first country with decimal currency and have spent centuries looking down at our noses at those silly furriners with their unwieldy money. So very un-British, don’tcher know?
It was suggested that instead of having pounds and pence, we should have shillings and pence. Pounds seem so iconic that I can’t imagine that ever being taken seriously, but who knows? Maybe that could’ve happened after all and we’d be thinking of pounds as the antiquated version. I remember English tourists in Austria talking about their Schilling seeming old-fashioned, like it was still the War, but in fact I found the Austrian use of that currency, which at the time was roughly equivalent to what our shilling would’ve been, made it a no-brainer to keep track of how much I was spending, by contrast with Italy and its lira, which seemed basically like monopoly money to me (no offence to Italians meant). All that’s gone now of course, and without commenting on the economics and politics of the situation, the actual name of the Euro seems a bit ill-thought through, although presumably it’s supposed to emphasise a common European identity. I wonder if potential Leave voters would have been subliminally made more sympathetic to the EU if they’d adopted a British-sounding unit such as the shilling instead. Then again, I know I wouldn’t’ve been swayed, having only very reluctantly voted remain, and I don’t want to belittle their reasoning or dimiss their altruistic motives for wanting to leave.
The ultimate ease with which we adjusted to decimal currency was not at all reflected in what happened with British metrication. Like the currency issue, this could have been the other way round too, because before the French Revolution plans were afoot in Britain to devise a system of units of this kind. It was frustrated partly by the Revolution itself and partly because the US, UK and France couldn’t agree on which country the quadrant defining the length of the metre should pass through. This issue would later have been superceded by the redefinition of units using physical constants such as wavelengths of light, although by then the damage had been done and all sorts of encrustations of nationalism had reduced the streamlining of global adoption. Incidentally, something which has long intrigued me, and is shown in the above map, is the position of Myanmar, which has expressed its intention of adopting the metric system but seems not to have done so, and still uses its own national measurements which are not easily converted to either imperial or metric. However, its currency is close to being decimal, although it has its own units for five and two and a half mu. It uses both imperial and metric units in its interaction with the outside world. I don’t understand whether this is a political statement of nationalism or something else because to my shame I lack a firm grasp of the nature of the régime in the country. The other four larger exceptions (not for the time being acknowledging what’s going on in Polynesia as that’s new to me) are the “U”K, US, Canada and Liberia. The US and Liberia form a unit because the latter was founded as if it was the US but an independent Black majority version of the country, so it makes sense that it would use Imperial. The US use of Imperial is harder to explain. As with Britain, there were moves to metricate the country in the 1960s and ’70s which didn’t succeed. Canada has presumably been dragged along by American ties, so although it’s largely metric it probably has little choice but to use Imperial in some circumstances. The “U”K is going to be something I know a lot more about than the others because I live here.
Britain is stuck between the two systems now because Thatcher halted metrication in the 1981. Whereas I’m no fan of the Imperial system and not that big a fan of metric for reasons which are probably already apparent but upon which I shall dilate forthwith, I would expect most people to agree that the worst of all situations in this respect is to be forever stuck between the two. To be frank, I’d actually prefer us to have stayed Imperial than the current situation, which is more an indictment of the status quo than a recommendation. My father was the metrication officer for his workplace, so I’m a little closer than most people are to the programme. The British Standards Institution, again something my father was very involved in along with the ISO, began to raise the matter in 1962, culminating in the establishment of the Metrication Board at the end of ’68. Because my family was rather central in the drive to metrication in this country, I can’t really tell how others perceived it and my own experience involved the use of metric rather than imperial units from an early age. State schooling also went over to teaching the metric system from the late ’60s, meaning that I am of the cohort which expects units to be in metric and tends to think in those terms, at least more than most other people in this country do. There was very little contrary pressure for me. Imperial units were quaint, antiquated things like putting units before the tens or the “old money”. The metric system was the FUTURE! It was as if the units we were learning to use as children would be the ones a few of us might use on our missions to Mars or when designing sentient robots. But there was for some reason a surprising degree of resistance to them, for no apparent reason other than its association with this country, possibly the empire, and the past. People don’t like change, I suppose. ‘Nationwide’ (there it is again) held a competition where they had two cars, one called Long Live The Mile and the other Vive Le Kilomètre, which would go a certain distance depending on votes for the imperial or the metric system, and the discrepancy between the two was enormous, something like ten to one if I recall correctly, in favour of the imperial system. This was a publicity stunt of course because it’s like a telephone poll, which tends to distort scores in favour of one option rather than the other, but it remains the case that there very probably was such a big inequality in the country’s opinion. It’s also notable that rather than just calling the metric car Long Live The Kilometre, they gave it a French name, making it seem like the metric system was foreign rather than international, and moreover associating it with our traditional enemies the French, and also the EEC. A stunt to be sure, but probably one which reflected the national mood fairly well.
There is currently a British single-issue pressure group called the UK Metric Association which continues to promote the metric system in this country, which among other things aims to address certain myths about metrication. One of these, which is currently a fairly hot topic, is that the EU forced metrication upon us. Well, the UK joined the EEC on the 1st January 1973, several years after metrication began, in 1965, and metrication and decimalisation really proceeded hand in hand. I’m too young to remember, but there seems to have been no suggestion that decimalisation was some kind of foreign plot. The metric system is also not more associated with the EU than it is with most of the rest of the world, with only three countries seriously diverging. There is also a fair bit of anti-American xenophobia in this country which however has not been harnessed in the same way. Ordnance Survey maps have been using a metric grid system since the 1940s, meaning that our roads and other civil engineering projects have inherited that system on their own maps and surveying is also done in metric, so we have soft metrication on our roads and the like, not hard, but they aren’t imperial. Incidentally, soft metrication is where pounds and inches are still used ostensibly but the quantities are actually quoted in metric, as with the labels on groceries, so you still get a pound of sugar, for example, but it’s labelled as 453 grammes. It was also claimed that phrases such as “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” would be outlawed, which is just not true. I can remember that when the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 was introduced, it was similarly stated that it would become illegal to say words like “hostess”, which was a complete lie. I presume these rumours arose without planning or instigation though. A related falsehood regards placenames such as the Mile End Road, which is obviously absurd.
The problem with having two systems is not trivial. For instance, it can mean there need to be two production lines for standards of dimensions in metric and imperial. There are legal problems because of planning and property, and restraining orders, using metric but being quoted or thought of in imperial. Oddly, because the rest of the Commonwealth is metric, this puts Britain at odds with them as well as the EU. The Thatcher government is responsible for this mess. A few months after being elected, the Conservative government of 1979 abolished the Metrication Board, which it regarded as an unnecessary waste of public money, but the cost to business of maintaining two systems can be considerable, for instance through increasing the cost of factory machines having to be duplicated to work in them both when manufacturing products for export, and this isn’t even confined to the smaller businesses which tend to be ignored by government but even multinationals. The excuse was made that its work was done, but it clearly wasn’t. And now we’re stuck.
It’s odd how a government headed by a scientist such as Thatcher should decide to halt metrication. This, in fact, is part of the general oddness of the Thatcher years, where someone who might be expected to make policy decisions based on evidence due to their background appears not to have done so. However, there’s also the largely spurious association between the system and the Common Market, which might go some way to explaining it, and it’s also a crowd-pleaser. In that respect, in a way she didn’t go far enough because returning completely to the imperial system would have been even more popular and would have had a nationalistic flavour to it. Thus I’m not sure why she made that particular decision. It’s also interesting that by 1979 there was absolutely no interest or mileage (!) to be made from going back to the old money, and in fact the new money could be said to have become a rallying point later in the 1980s with sterling in opposition to the EMU/ECU.
One important point in favour of certain imperial units should be made. A yard is three feet and a foot is twelve inches. This means a yard can be divided exactly by three and a foot by two, three, four and six. The same cannot be done using the metric system, which only allows exact integer divisions within an order of magnitude of two and five. However, this is more an inadequacy of the metric system than an advantage of the imperial as the units are inconsistent in most cases. Although I can’t track it down, there is some kind of decimal system within the imperial which is however obscured by the existence of intermediate units, but this is not to recommend it because ten is only chosen due to most European languages using decimal counting.
I’ve been referring to this system as “metric” throughout, but of course the official name is Système International, reflecting its largely French origins. It’s also been known as the extended MKSA system, and this contrasts with another version of the metric system referred to as CGS. MKSA stands for Metre, Kilogramme, Second, Ampere, the base units from which most of the others can be mathematically derived, and when I first learned of this I found it peculiar that the kilogramme rather than the gramme was in there because it’s a multiple, but if grammes had been used, many of the other units would’ve ended up the wrong size. CGS was an older system, based on centimetres, grammes and seconds, which has a similar discrepancy in using the centimetre rather than the metre. Einstein’s famous E=mc2 uses this system as it measures the speed of light in centimetres per second and consequently calculates the energy released as ergs rather than joules, which are a hundred thousand times larger than ergs. There are a separate set of derived units, including the aforementioned erg but also the dyne rather than the newton, and in electromagnetism there have been several different versions of units which nowadays have been reduced to the gauss, which is quite a small quantity roughly equivalent to the strength of Earth’s magnetic field.
There have been two generations of units in another way too. The original units are based on the metre, kilogramme and second, and consequently more derived units can be made regarding area, volume and velocity, but the improvement of scientific knowledge (if that’s the right way of looking at it) in physics and chemistry led to new units being invented such as the mole (which is actually really a number) and the electromagnetic units, which are however associated with the “more basic” units. There are also at least two units which are mathematically derived: the radian and steradian, which measure angle and three-dimensional angle. These make sense from the perspective of trigonometry but don’t seem very useful or easy to work with. That said, they have a “naturalness” to them which most other units lack. For instance, kelvin and what I call centigrade but is also known as celsius both rely on dividing temperature from the melting point of ice to the boiling point of water at sea level by a hundred, and water turns up in other units too such as the kilogramme, which is the mass of a cubic decimetre of water at 4°C, but in fact it might make more sense to make the temperature scale more like decibels, doubling indefinitely with cooling in order to keep absolute zero at an infinite distance. More prosaically, the use of ares, which are a hundred square metres, and the more commonly employed hectare, is a bit peculiar, as are litres and tonnes.
Several units in the imperial system were based on the human body, which I suppose makes them more “human”, although of course this body is that of an able-bodied white adult male, which isn’t ideal. The original units of the metric system, by contrast, are based on the distance between the North Pole and Equator divided by ten million, the earlier definition of the metre. Later on it was defined as an appropriate fraction of the distance travelled by a light beam in vacuo. But during the twentieth century, various discoveries were made regarding such things as the charge of the electron and quantum mechanics which revealed that the Universe effectively already has a system of weights and measures and that the one we devised from the eighteenth Christian century onward was not easily converted to it. The most obvious one of these units would of course be velocity: the speed of light in vacuo is much more fundamental than metres per second. The others are based on quantum mechanics and measure length, time, energy, force and temperature. They figuratively represent the resolution and frame rate of reality, and are extremely unwieldy as such, as length and time are very short indeed, far smaller than the effective size of subatomic particles or any currently established familiar feature of the world, and force and temperature are extremely high. As the metric system has demonstrated, though, one can multiply or divide one’s way out of the predicament.
The Planck Length is 1.616255(18)×10−35 metres, which is as much smaller than a proton as a grain of sand is smaller than the distance to τ Ceti. However, it’s also very close to being an exact multiple of ten times smaller than a mile, which ironically means that if we based our measurements on a decimal system like the metric one, one of our units would be only 0.4% longer than a mile was in the first place. The Planck Time is about 5.39×10−44 seconds, and is the time taken for light to cross the Planck Length. This isn’t as close as the multiple of a Planck Length is to a mile, but a suitably multiplied time unit in a kind of metric system does come out reasonably close to a minute at 53.9 seconds. The exception to the inconvenient sizes of the units is the Planck Energy, which is about the same as the chemical energy of a full tank of petrol in a car at 34.2 megajoules. The other two are far too large but can of course be scaled down. The Planck force is said to be the gravitational attraction between two objects of Planck mass one Planck length apart, and puzzlingly for me also the same with electromagnetic attraction or repulsion, and is 1.210295 x 1044 newtons. A Planck mass is 21.8 microgrammes, so like Planck energy it’s within reasonable distance of being useful as it is. It’s defined as the mass of a particle whose wavelength is one Planck length when that is equivalent to the energy of that particle. Finally, Planck temperature is 1.416784(16)×1032 K, which is the highest possible temperature. I don’t know why.
All of this is expressed in decimal. The units themselves are one choice of more fundamental measurements than what we have now, but simply to use them in multiples of ten like the metric system is questionable. As you probably know, I advocate for the duodecimal system although there are other options which have their own merits, but they would involve changing the very words we use for counting in some cases, perhaps to an international standard. Hexadecimal has its own plusses, being easy to halve the quantities and so forth. But a system of weights and measures based on universal constants, assuming they really are constant, would be shared by other sentiences throughout the Universe in the sense that they would at least be able to understand it if their physics is the same, and would also make various calculations much simpler, just as BMI is based on the metric system for example, or calculations of drug doses are easier in metric.
Maybe that would be the best system, and it stops me from throwing my lot in with the UK Metric Association, but as a well-known phrase has it, “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good”. The metric system is a compromise, but one that’s accepted unconsciously by most of the human world insofar as it’s involved in the global economy. Presumably uncontacted tribes do not use the metric system. British rejection of metric was a precursor of Brexit. The public perceived the system as foreign and associated with mainland Europe despite enormous evidence to the contrary such as the Commonwealth’s adoption of metric. The imperial system may also have an appeal precisely because it’s less rational and thought-through than metric if one has a distrust for human reasoning and planning, which seems to be a major motivation for political conservatism. Awareness of the flaws in the system does in fact lead me to some sympathy with the idea that metric is not ideal, but it doesn’t make me want to replace it with the far inferior imperial system.
Given all that, though, one thing still puzzles me. The decimalisation and metrication projects began to be pursued in their most recent phase in the 1960s. Decimalisation succeeded so well that the old money is forgotten now, but metrication failed. Why is this?
A Box Of Chocolates 