A Mania for Metric : Northridge: Engineer works to convert the U.S. to the system used in other countries.

For the past 30 years or so, Valerie Antoine has been inching along toward her goal--though that would not be her choice of words.

As executive director of the Northridge-based U.S. Metric Assn., Antoine is trying to get Americans to stop thinking in terms of inches and pounds and start thinking in meters and kilograms.

Although a federal act directed all government agencies to use the metric system in all grants and contracts with private firms by Oct. 1, 1992, the United States is about 15 years away from converting to the measuring system used by nearly every other nation, she said.

But Antoine, 77, remains optimistic that the first shot in the metric revolution has been fired.

“I’m not disappointed that they are not moving as fast as I like,” said Antoine, an engineer at Litton Guidance & Control Systems in Woodland Hills. “I’m delighted.”

The 1988 Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act required all 39 federal agencies to use the metric system in grants, procurements and other business-related activities, where economically feasible, by Oct. 1, 1992.

Gary P. Carver, chief of the federal metric program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said no federal agency has converted entirely to metric but many have used the metric measuring system exclusively for large programs and contracts.

The act was intended to get businesses to convert by first converting the largest buyer of American products--the U.S. government. But Carver said it is still too early to tell how successful the act has been.

“It’s a gradual kind of thing,” he said. “The industry is in control. We are not forcing industries to make any changes. If they say ‘No way,’ we say ‘OK.’ ”

But on a local level, the conversion to metric has generated little, if any, action among business leaders.

Ben Reznick, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., said metric conversion has not been discussed among group members and the association has done nothing to promote conversion to metric.

“I’ve heard no discussion,” said Reznick, a development attorney. “In my line of work people are still talking about a 35-foot-tall building.”

Pacoima-based Precision Dynamics, which produces disposable medical products, converted to the metric system years ago and encourages others to do the same, said Walter W. Mosher Jr., president and chief executive officer of the firm.

“I think the United States is behind the eight ball on this,” he said. “The sooner we get it done, the better.”

But Mike Pollock, a spokesman for Canoga Park-based Rocketdyne, a division of Rockwell International Corp., said the company does business with NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense but neither agency has requested that the firm convert to metric.

Despite the slow progress being made in converting the United States to the metric system, Antoine said the 1988 act brings the country closer than ever.

“We don’t have a choice--it’s going to happen,” she said.

Antoine and Carver agree that American industries that do not convert are at a disadvantage when doing business outside of the country.

Japan has identified American companies’ lack of metric usage as an impediment to access of U.S. goods into the Japanese home market, Antoine said. The European Community has said that it will stop accepting non-metric products at the end of the century, Carver said.

Antoine said she believes that once American industries are converted, the American public will soon fall in line.

But like a suitor unwilling to make a commitment, the United States has a long history of courting and then rejecting the metric system.

As early as 1790, Thomas Jefferson proposed that the United States adopt a new system of weights and measures. In 1795, a French government decree on the metric system was published in the United States. It was largely ignored.

In the 1970s, federal officials planned a program of strictly voluntary conversion to the metric system that was to take 10 years. Although metric units were widely adopted in some industries, President Reagan cut funds for conversion programs in the 1980s.

Antoine’s explanation of Americans’ failure to convert is simple: “People hate change.”

She was first introduced to the metric system in a class at Santa Monica City College in 1960, she said. When she went to the library to read about the subject, Antoine said she found only three books, all 1920s vintage.

“It was crazy,” she said.

She later joined the U.S. Metric Assn., a grass-roots organization formed in 1916 at Columbia University in New York. Its current membership is about 1,400, most of whom are teachers and engineers.

Antoine runs the national organization from two crowded spare rooms in her Northridge home. The rooms are lined from floor to ceiling with volumes of newspaper clippings, reports and books on the metric system.

Being on the front lines of a revolution has kept Antoine busy.

On a daily basis she answers several phone calls from companies interested in converting to the metric system. She also types out the bimonthly edition of the association’s newsletter, Metric Today, on a tiny personal computer.

“It really keeps me hopping,” she said.

In the past year, the number of companies in the association jumped from about 25 to 100--an increase she attributes to the federal act.

But she said she doubts that such long-held American expressions as “going the whole nine yards” will have to be converted to “going the whole 8.3 meters.”

“We will still have the inchworm,” she said. “That is not going to change, and it doesn’t have to change.”

BACKGROUND

The metric system is a measuring system in which the gram (.0022046 pounds), the meter (39.37 inches), and the liter (61.025 cubic inches) are the basic units of weight, length and capacity, respectively. Unlike the English weights and measuring units, the metric system is based on the number 10. Units of lengths, for example, increase by power of 10, such as centimeters, decimeters and meters. The liter is the volume of a cube 10 centimeters on each side. Under the English system, however, the foot is made up of 12 inches, the yard is three feet, pound is 16 ounces and the gallon is four quarts.