MORE THAN A MILE

BEHIND
“100 Degrees? You were out in the Sun at a HUNDRED DEGREES?” I asked my friend,
irked at the extent of the hyperbole
“Yes. And as I was saying...”
“What, hold up, you do realize water BOILS into steam at a hundred degrees, right?” I
retorted to my friend incredulously.
“Wait, what? No, it doesn’t! In fact, New York gets to around 100 degrees in the summer! He
replied.

Liberia, Myanmar……and The United States.

What connects these three nations? The Imperial system.
The map illustrates this point below.

Figure 1- Those in red use the English units of measurement

In an interconnected world which prides itself on seamlessly integrating ideas, concepts, and
collaborations from all over the World, can this metric-English boundary be a tripping wire
interrupting these collaborations? With several cities in the United States acting as global
hubs for commerce, natural sciences, finance and even fashion, the difference in
1
measurements can be debilitating, disorienting and could even discourage collaborations or
partnerships with American firms, due to apprehension in having to keep switching their units
and measurements. For an international student who has set his first steps in New York for
his college, or a business tycoon who has arrived in Wall Street to seal off a new million
dollar deal, the switch in units is like an abrupt yank from reality.

The decadent imperial system of units (or the English units- though even their very own
creators don’t use it any longer!) were developed separately with accepted norms between the
conversions. This means that there is no logical, consistent reasoning between the units, since
they were all developed independently. For example:

12 inches: 1foot

3 feet: 1 yard

1760 yards: 1 mile

This shows the lack of consistency expressed earlier. Each unit has a very different identity
with another. Compare this with the metric where indicators such as the prefix milli-
indicates a set relation (10^-3 or 1 in thousand) to the base unit metre. This same relation is
validated even across a different entity, such as the litre, or kilogram. This makes the system
of units more intuitive from a logical point of view, compared to the hodgepodge that is the
English units with no connection between them.

Figure 1- An illustration to demonstrate the simplicity of the metric system.

A famous example of a collaboration gone wrong due to the duality of measurements used
worldwide could be the famous Russian American space collaboration after the cold war. The
collaboration intended on creating a $120 million worth project where an orbiter would be
launched to the surface of Mars. Unfortunately, the spacecraft exploded midair before leaving
the Earth’s atmosphere because NASA’s engineering team used English units of
measurement while the Russian used the more conventional metric system for a key
spacecraft operation. While such an error might appear wasteful, it is actually not so. There
are possibly millions of calculations, and it is not unsurprising that a calculation went askew
and was later unverified between units. The underlying point is that such an error would have
a reduced probability had we all used the same units.

2
In fact, the metric unit’s sheer effectiveness has led to fields in the US such as healthcare,
space technology and energy resorting to the metric system independently. The level of
accuracy received by the metric systems largely outweighs the English system. Just take
healthcare for example. As PBS- an independent science journal puts it rather eloquently
“There's even evidence that, when prescriptions call for doses in millilitres and come with a
metric dispenser, people make far fewer mistakes than when dosages are in teaspoons, which
raises another question. Teaspoons? It's two-and-a-half centuries since we broke from King
George, and our health care system is using teaspoons?”

 Conclusion
Such a drastic change of changing the units is neither too draconian nor unwarranted. Several
countries have changed their measurement convention in the past, and it need not be a sudden
change on a federal level overnight. Perhaps, a gradual change starting with schools, or a
state-wide change in cosmopolitan cities as a testing phase could all make the transition a
smoother process. Nevertheless, it is very critical to do so across all employment frontiers,
not just for our generation but for the subsequent ones. Is global conformity completely
beneficial? Absolutely not! A uniform World is an insipid one. Culture, history and heritage
are all keystones in what makes a society, and they each require uniqueness. But at a time of
global collaboration, switching systems to a uniform one is the principle of uniformity rather
than conformity. As the PBS editor sums it up “Just as kids in China are racing to learn
English, the world's linguistic standard, shouldn't American kids be mastering metric, the
world's measurement standard?”

Bibliography

1. Lloyd, Robin. “Metric Mishap Caused Loss of NASA Orbiter.” CNN, Cable News
Network, 30 Sept. 1999, www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/.
2. Marciano, John Bemelmans. “Why Won't America Go Metric?” Time, Time
Magazine, 9 Dec. 2019, time.com/3633514/why-wont-america-go-metric/.
3. Locke, Susannah. “It's Time for the US to Use the Metric System.” Vox, Vox, 20 Dec.
2014, www.vox.com/2014/5/29/5758542/time-for-the-US-to-use-the-metric-system.
4. NewsHour, PBS. “Could the United States Finally Adopt the Metric System?” PBS,
Public Broadcasting Service, 22 June 2016, www.pbs.org/newshour/show/could-the-
united-states-finally-adopt-the-metric-system.