Going Metric: A Miss Is as Good as a Mile in U.S.

Whatever became of the Indy 804.5 and the rest of the metric system?

“The whole thing went away and died,” said Ray Lloyd of the Scale Manufacturers Assn.

He meant the 1975 act of Congress that was to have consigned pounds, inches, rods, furlongs, picas, acres, gills, gallons, miles per hour and their myriad cousins to the trash bin for a brave new world of metrics. Officially, three bureaucrats, a secretary and a $250,000 budget inside the huge Department of Commerce in Washington are what remain of that vision of a metric America.

A Foot in the Door

But inch by inch the meter has wedged a foot in the back door of the nation.

Oh, a miss is still as good as a mile. Lovers still love a bushel and a peck, not a liter and a stere.

But almost all American cars are built to metric measure. Booze and wine come by the liter. Skis, film, pharmaceuticals are in millimeters and grams. Edwin Moses runs the 400-meter hurdles. Almost all grade schoolers learn some metrics. “Star Wars,” when and if, will be metric, as the Pentagon honorably discharges the old measurements inherited from Great Britain where a yard was the distance from Henry I’s nose to the tip of his middle finger.

Sixty-two percent of the Fortune 1,000 companies make something that is metric. Thirty-four percent of their new products are. In five or six years probably all packaged goods on supermarket shelves will be labeled gram-liters as well as pound-ounces.

In addition, an omnibus trade bill that the House passed on Thursday contains a provision requiring 42 agencies of the federal government to basically go metric by Sept. 30, 1993. That includes the Department of Defense, the biggest buyer of them all. In hearings last summer, no organized constituency opposed the metric portion of the bill.

Ask anyone who knows a hand (4 inches) from a hectare: Will America ever be metric? The invariable answer: inevitably. When? Nobody can say. Congress is charged by the Constitution with regulating weights and measures. Congress is Congress. And old habits are old habits.

Declared U.S. Policy

In the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, Congress declared it the policy of the United States to “coordinate and plan . . . the voluntary conversion to the metric system.” Note the word voluntary.

This bold pronouncement, toothless as a professional hockey player, was akin to telling the nation’s 4-year-olds: “Eat your broccoli because it’s good for you, but you can stick to ice cream if you want.” Americans, by and large, preferred vanilla.

To be or not to be metric has been called America’s longest debate. Congress almost adopted the meter in 1896. But the nation’s largest trading partner, Britain and its empire, were pound-inches. The United States went along.

“Inch-pounds led and lead the world because of the standards and technology that support them,” Charles Wilson, director of engineering for the Industrial Fastener Institute, said recently.

By the 1960s, however, American industry was expanding overseas into a largely metric world. In 1969 the United States exported $14 billion in measure-sensitive products and imported only $6 billion. But by 1975 it was estimated that the nation would incur a $600-million loss in foreign business because it was not metric.

Based on Metrics

In 1971 the National Bureau of Standards, whose official yard and pound are based on metric measure, completed a 3-year study of metrication. Two years later General Motors announced it would make metric cars. The 1975 act originally set a 10-year schedule for conversion. Heavy lobbying, particularly by trade unions and small businesses, struck this out. Although the act set up a 17-member Metric Board, it was only empowered to “publicize,” “encourage,” “consult” and “assist.”

“How can you do something if it’s not mandated?” asked metric hard-liner Louis Sokol, past president of the private U.S. Metric Assn. “We don’t make speed limits or the income tax voluntary. The metric board just became a debating society.”

“We missed an opportunity 13 years ago,” Gerald Underwood conceded. His Office of Metric Programs--that four-person operation at the Commerce Department--is what survives of the Metric Board that once had 100 employees and a $3-million annual budget. Ronald Reagan cut off its funds in 1982.

“Metrication should have been presented in terms of trade instead of conformance,” said Underwood, “focused on the pocketbook instead of the agony of converting the housewife’s recipe book. But I believe in free enterprise rather than government dictate.”

“We felt the enormity of the problem of conversion was completely underestimated,” said Bob Woods, research director for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

New Tools Needed

Machinists and carpenters would have to buy new tools. They would be fired for miss-measuring. Above all, foreign metric goods would pour in.

“Of course, that’s what happened anyway,” said Sokol.

Just what metric conversion nationally might cost seems impossible to calculate. One unattributed estimate was $25 billion over 30 years. The Pentagon has said it would cost the defense industry $18 billion, three-fourths of that in the first 10 years. The steel industry had a figure of $2 billion in 1973 but said actuality was “nothing close” to the original estimate.

“The Ford Motor Co. started with a metrication department which became a section, then a group and then me,” said George Baumgartner, whose job as metric planner was done away with last year. “The cost was negligible. Everything is now metric except the speedometer and tire rims. Our biggest problem is how to spell liter. L-i-t-r-e?”

“GM found the accounting costs for conversion cost more than conversion itself,” said Sokol. The pharmaceutical industry, which converted in the 1950s, said the cost was lower than expected and produced savings through fewer mistakes, easier employee training and improved records.

Economies of Scale

Small businesses, on the other hand, don’t have the economies of scale.

“Machine tools can cost $2 million,” said Wilson of the Fastener Institute. “Changing dies is very expensive, so you want to make as many items as you can without having to tear the machine up to make another size. The U.S. uses 200 billion fasteners a year. It would cost billions to stock dual sizes.”

John Deere, where Underwood was head of standards, spent one-third the value of its shelf parts on annual inventory. “Part of that cost is insurance, space, heat, light. Standardization reduces these costs. We used to have about 70 screw sizes. Metrication reduced that to 12 or 15, which meant economies in buying in bulk, number of bins and errors.

“For the nation, it’s almost impossible to figure a cost. But we figure each $1 billion in manufacturing means 30,000 jobs. Anything that metrication does to improve our international trade is then part of that equation.”

To purists, the late 1970s were the “golden years” of metrication. Interstate highway signs announced distances in miles-kilometers. Schools blossomed with colorful conversion posters. Shell Oil spent $2 million converting 16,000 gas stations. Sunrise, Fla., said it would go entirely metric to celebrate the Bicentennial.

Back to Gallons

Motorists immediately began “screaming their heads off,” said the Federal Highway Administration. In 1978 Congress took the signs down. Shell soon found metric gas pumps confused drivers and converted back to gallons. When the National Geographic Society started using metrics on maps and stories, about 70 readers said the magazine had gone pinko and canceled their subscriptions.

Metric zealots “just kind of gave up and went looking for other crusades,” said Valerie Antoine, executive director of the U.S. Metric Assn.

Metricians had hoped that the schools would incubate a metric America. “But when the rest of society didn’t keep pace, teachers said, ‘Hey, we got left out on a limb,’ ” said Leroy Negus, associate in mathematics at the New York State Department of Education.

California said all its textbooks would be metric by 1985. They aren’t. But almost all schools in the country include some metric instruction. Oct. 10--get it? 10-10--still kicks off National Metric Week.

The effort is to get children to think metric as well as know it, to know right off that 28 degrees Celsius is hot outside without multiplying nine-fifths plus 32 to get Fahrenheit.

Used Outside of Class

Kent Ashworth of Educational Testing Service, the Princeton, N.J., organization that gives Scholastic Aptitude Tests, said a survey of 13-year-olds showed those who use metrics “often” outside class more than doubled--16% to 34%--between 1978 and 1982.

But in a 1981 test given internationally, American students finished near the bottom in measurement skills.

“Children are taught both systems,” said Sokol. “They are knowledgeable in both and proficient in neither.”

As a ninth-grader wrote the late Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige: “If you ask me, it’s confusing using both (systems) when our nation could choose one. . . . Please keep this letter in consideration and remember all of the confused kids in this country.”

Sokol worries, too, about adult education. Why did some newspapers convert the 70- and 80-meter ski jump results at the recent Calgary Winter Olympics to feet? Why, when President Reagan clunked 14-pound congressional bills on the dais in his recent State of the Union address, didn’t he call them 6.2-kilogram bills? “What a wasted opportunity,” Sokol bemoaned.

Lone Holdouts

The United States stands alone with Burma as the only non-metric holdouts in a kilogram world. Canada said in 1970 it would go metric, and did. Its metric commission disbanded in 1985. “No problems,” said Francois Broeur of the Ministry of Consumer and Corporate Affairs.

He probably didn’t talk to LaRae Willson, an American housewife in Thunder Bay, Ontario. “Liters, schmeeters. I just tell the man to fill up the tank. I follow my butcher from Safeway to Safeway because he’ll sell me meat in pounds.”

She admitted to carrying a pound-kilo pocket converter. “You gotta eat.”

Britain decided to go metric in 1972. Highway signs are still in miles--too costly to change--and a pint of bitter mild is a pint of bitter mild.

Australia set a 10-year timetable and converted in eight. Japan started metrication in 1921 and made it compulsory in 1951, saying sayonara to the 11.93-inch shaku and 8.267-pound kan .

Foreign Birth a Factor

In the United States, the meter’s foreign birth is “undoubtedly a factor” in resistance to it, Underwood acknowledged. “But there is an enormous explosion of technology in the world. It’s taking place everywhere, not just America. The upshot is international collaboration, and the language of that collaboration is metric.”

Measurement uncertainties can have immediate effects. There was confusion at first over just what radiation units the Soviets were using to assess radiation levels at Chernobyl. A Canadian plane crashed when it ran out of fuel after a refill mix-up. More critical at a time of America’s huge trade deficit is the fact that 10% of the nation’s gross national product derives from foreign commerce, two-thirds of that being measure-sensitive products.

If the 1975 Metric Act had no incisors and the University of Michigan Survey Research Center said only 40% of Americans can name even one metric unit, there is nonetheless a considerable metric component in U.S. life.

“Sixty-five to 68% of supermarket goods are prepackaged and 70% of that has metric labels,” said George Carlton, chairman of the Food and Grocery Coordinating Committee on Metrication. “The No. 2 can is standard worldwide. The consumer knows how many kids a No. 2 can will feed. The rubber hits the road when the housewife meets the retailer at the meat counter and pays 2.205 times as much for a kilo of hamburger than she paid for a pound.”

But wine went metric in 1978 and hard liquor in 1980. Soft drinks have gone to two-liter bottles with no reading on the Richter scale.

If Packaged in Swahili

“If a commodity is desired, it doesn’t matter if it’s packaged in Swahili,” said Al Navas, president of the National Metric Council in Washington. “Metric transition is going to come about product by product.”

Cars are easy because new models are always being introduced. Machines like drill presses are adjustable by definition. Many small businesses will make whatever their customers want.

Some think American industry will be predominantly metric by the turn of the century. Wilson thinks it will take 75 years.

Market forces will probably be more determining than the government.

“Metrics never elected a senator,” Navas said. “It isn’t liberal-conservative or Republican-Democrat. It’s apolitical. I was on a radio talk show in Detroit recently, and they cut me off after 25 minutes. No one was calling in to protest metrics.”

15 Million Contracts

Probably the bell cow in metric transition will be the Pentagon, with its 300,000 suppliers in the defense industry and 15 million contracts a year. The Army’s multibillion-dollar LHX helicopter will be metric. So will “Star Wars,” Reagan’s proposed missile-defense system.

Last September the Defense Department said its policy was to use metric “in all of its activities consistent with security . . . technical, logistical and safety requirements.” Any deviation has to be cleared by senior officials. Fourteen percent of defense standards are already metric.

Partially this is the result of the U.S. alliance in an otherwise metric NATO. “But we’re talking about the equipment we’ll be fighting with into the 21st Century,” said Air Force Col. Thomas Mansperger, Pentagon metric coordinating officer. “We base it on what we see our future needs will be and what kind of world we’re going to work in.”

A metric world.