50 Years Ago Today, the Metric Conversion (kinda) Started

digitalfutur · 2025-04-02T01:35:55+00:00

With temperatures broadcast in C as well as F. After the Celsius switch, rain and snow accumulations went metric later in 1975. Schools began to teach metric exclusively that September. Cars and road signs made the change in 1977. Gasoline was sold by the litre in 1979. But watch that oven temperature and those wheel sizes ! But as any home car mechanic knows, the standard socket size is 10 mm for smaller jobs. Vive la différence !

Hydraglass

GrumpyCanadian I mean… at the end of the day we should blame the 1960s and 70s computer scientists who decided that they would call 2¹⁰ their “power of 10” for metric purposes and 1(2¹⁰) would be kilo, 1(2²⁰) would be Mega, 1(2³⁰) would be giga, and 1(2⁴⁰) would be tera… sure it was convenient because at the kilo and mega scale it was close enough to the actual power of 10 value to be convenient… but they really shouldn’t have ever done it and the kibi mibi crap never should have existed and it should have been an entirely new terminology they used for the power of 2 values – when I was in university with all my comp sci, comp eng and ee buddies we used to sit around at the lunch table and chat about this and talk about what we might have named them (and this was all the way back in the early 90s, 35 years ago, that we even knew then how silly kilo/mega/giga was for powers of 2). I remember one guy had an idea that it should have been “biten, bitwen, bithr, bifor, bifif” - beaning 2 to the power 10, 2 to the power twenty, 2 to the power 30 etc.. - entirely new words not used for anything else. My ideas weren’t as good - I had tried to work out a terminology using “duo” or “double” or “ex” for exponential, nothing worth sharing 😉

Avernar

GrumpyCanadian until some marketing person decided that they could inflate their numbers for traditional rotating HDDs

And it was temporary until everyone else started doing it. Now we’re all stuck with it.

Avernar

Hydraglass I mean… at the end of the day we should blame the 1960s and 70s computer scientists

Nah. I don’t blame them. Everything was fine until one marketing weenie messed it up. Remembering the rule that “computers use power of 2 units” is easy.

Hydraglass mibi

mebi

Hydraglass “biten, bitwen, bithr, bifor, bifif”

Sounds German and like many German words, most don’t roll off the tongue nicely for an English speaker. 😜

Seriously, “bifif” is just as bad as “gibi”.

GrumpyCanadian

Avernar Remembering the rule that “computers use power of 2 units” is easy.

Agreed, except that is has to be universal, including for transfer rates. If we were going to agree that the “rule” was computing topics meant powers of 2, then we can never have exceptions, lest we invite the current mess of having to distinguish between the two with separate units to eliminate ambiguity. That, on its own isn’t so bad, until you start having people indiscriminately going back and forth between them, or cooking up such awful names for the new units. It’s maddening that we are now saddled with both.

Avernar

GrumpyCanadian Agreed, except that is has to be universal, including for transfer rates. If we were going to agree that the “rule” was computing topics meant powers of 2, then we can never have exceptions, lest we invite the current mess of having to distinguish between the two with separate units to eliminate ambiguity.

I agree. Unfortunately it started way before Ethernet with the 14.4kbps and 19.2kbps notation. Ethernet could have saved things by going with a 26.6752MHz crystal instead of 25Mhz

urbanriot

Avernar

Not me. Someone tells me the outside temperature in Fahrenheit and I’ll look at them like a deer in the headlights.

It could be our proximity to the US border which has us ambidextrous with temperature.

It’s funny, I was born into a country that was metric then moved to Canada and had to learn imperial but years later had to flip back to metric after I became comfortable with 80 degrees is a warm day and 32 degrees is a cold day.

It’s so funny how Canada is so steeped in metric but it wasn’t that long ago that they weren’t.

Avernar

urbanriot It could be our proximity to the US border which has us ambidextrous with temperature.

I grew up in Mississauga and we had an antenna for a good 10 years. But none of the Fahrenheit stuff rubbed off on me.

I do however remember “There’s a fire in North Tonawonda!” on the news almost every week.

GrumpyCanadian

Avernar That bad habit started long before Ethernet (early 80s) or the V.32bis standard (1991). So, in that respect, maybe @Hydraglass was right; blame the technical dolts from the 1950s and 1960s.

To further muddy this discussion, there is even the old debate about what constitutes a “byte”. This monstrosity still lives on, with some software still designed to handle 7-bit character encodings. At least now, it is fairly specific in French; it is “octet”, which is why you will see units like “Mo” and “Go”. I don’t know how the newer binary-unit abominations translate.

Donoreo

I started school in the fall of 1973. I do not recall being taught anything other than the metric system, but then again kindergarten and grade 1 there is not much of any measuring system being taught so that is probably why.

The thing I find funny is how some people who have lived a majority of their lives now with metric still convert back to the old system. Refusal to change is all that is.

Hydraglass

Donoreo I grew up in a family with a machinist father, a construction carpenter uncle, a mom that was a restaurant cook, an aunt that was in the machinery industry, a brother that was in training to be an electrician, and a cousin who was studying to be a civil engineer. Imperial units were all that were ever talked about at home - dad did stuff in inches and fractions of an inch and thousandths of an inch, Mom did everything in cups and quarts and pints and degrees F, uncle did everything in feet yards and inches… Etc… Meanwhile all I learned in school was purely metric from my first day in 1977. I’m relatively ambidextrous and can just think in either - someone says 17cm I can hold my fingers apart that far and know what it is, I don’t translate it to inches first .. And same if they say 7 inches I can hold my fingers that far apart and know what it is, my brain has the base units of each system relatively well ingrained, but, given a choice thinking on my own, I go metric for almost everything other than very small measurement - I can’t think in microns or fractions of a millimeter - I really need thousandths of an inch - my brain knows how big 3 thou or 20 thou or 80 thou is innately but I couldn’t tell you how big .07mm is without really having to think about it.

px_eliezer_

Donoreo The thing I find funny is how some people who have lived a majority of their lives now with metric still convert back to the old system. Refusal to change is all that is.

Many would say that Imperial is more natural.

While the metric units’ association with physical constants makes them accurate, it makes them less practical for common use. The units of cups and tablespoons developed naturally because these objects were right there in the kitchen. The gram, on the other hand, was not developed with cooking and baking in mind, so it is much smaller than it needs to be. For the same reason, the foot and the ounce are also much more user-friendly than their metric counterparts. Also, because they have a base of ten, metric units cannot be divided into as many even fractions as imperial units. A meter can only be evenly divided into 2 or 5, while a foot can be divided into 2, 3, 4, or 6….

Despite claims from those who are ‘pro-metric-system’, neither system is based on arbitrary numbers. The metric system is based largely on something abstract – numbers – in order to make conversions easier. The imperial system is based on the way our brains work and based on what we actually use measurements for.

As much as we like to think of our brains as being perfect tools for perceiving the world, they are actually very imperfect. Our brains are not made to understand abstract numbers. This is why we have such problems with money, and why we make so many dumb decisions. How much money is $1,000? What does 1,000 jelly beans look like? The only way we know how much $1,000 is, is by relating it to something we know that costs that much. But how does the cost of a car relate to the cost of dinner? How many dinners is a car worth?

What’s the most common thing we use measurement for? Just going on personal experience, I would say it’s the measurement of people. How tall is she? How tall am I? How much has he grown? Human height has to be the most common use of feet/inches in everyday life! Yet, the metric system is HORRIBLE at measuring people. Outside of the U.S. people’s height is measured in centimeters! That’s insane! It takes a lot of work for the brain to be conditioned to the point where 133 centimeters can be visualized.

For most things that we need to measure, a centimeter is too small and a meter is too big! But, feet and inches are naturally easy to visualize and they are the perfect size to measure most things we deal with.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/advantages-imperial-system-over-metric-really-randall-steininger

To me, a half inch of rainfall sounds easier to visualize than 1.3 centimeters or 13 millimeters

Mary likes to brag that her boyfriend is 6 inches, not 152 millimeters.

digitalfutur

px_eliezer_ Imperial is only “more natural” because it was used for hundreds of years. We are only 2 generations into metric, an apples and oranges comparison when it comes to longevity. Imperial here will fade out over time, as it should. And there Imperial measurements that are no longer in wide use as they once were: Rod, Chain, Furlong, League, Fathom, Dram etc.

Btw, I weigh 13 stone 8, lol.

Donoreo

px_eliezer_ Many would say that Imperial is more natural.

Only because it was based on more natural things.

px_eliezer_ Also, because they have a base of ten, metric units cannot be divided into as many even fractions as imperial units. A meter can only be evenly divided into 2 or 5, while a foot can be divided into 2, 3, 4, or 6….

That is sort of the point, you do not need to divide into fractions when you can do it by 10s.

px_eliezer_

So remember that the Metric system is because of the French Revolution.

The History of the Metric System: from the French Revolution to the SI
https://the-gist.org/2014/05/the-history-of-the-metric-system-from-the-french-revolution-to-the-si/

But the French ALSO adopted a METRIC CALENDAR…!

Not a joke….!

Each week had 10 days (very metric!) but the people were REALLY pissed off because instead of a day off every 7 days, they now had a day off every 10 days.

The seven-day week was abandoned, and each 30-day month was divided into three periods of 10 days called décades, the last day of a décade being a rest day.

https://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/handouts/french/frcalendar.html

It was absurd and very harmful to the average worker.

So NOT everything based on 10 is automatically good.

The more that I think about it, the more the Metric system seems cold and sterile.

No personality.

It was designed that way, based on making humanity serve the earth, rather than the earth serving humanity.

The Measure of a Meter (HOW did a Meter become a Meter)
https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/the-measure-of-a-meter

No personality.

It’s why virtually no one says “Kilometerage” instead of “Mileage”.

ElQuintron

px_eliezer_ It’s why virtually no one says “Kilometerage” instead of “Mileage”.

Depends what language you’re speaking. 😉

px_eliezer_

digitalfutur Imperial is only “more natural” because it was used for hundreds of years.

The British, God bless them, still do Beer in pints (slightly larger than the US pint), and I hope that they always will.

A British pint is 568.261 ML (by contrast a US liquid pint is 473.176 ML).

If British pubs were forced to go metric, the beer would probably be served as 500 ML rather than 568 ML, a loss to society.

Avernar

GrumpyCanadian That bad habit started long before Ethernet (early 80s) or the V.32bis standard (1991)

Yes but most consumers didn’t encounter power of 10 prefixes for comms until faster modems came out. Serial line speeds tended to be written out in full 9600, 115200, etc. It doesn’t save you any characters 9.6k, 115.2k and only saves you one syllable while rolling of the tongue worse: nine-ty six hun-dred vs nine point six kay. Most people just dropped the k (kay) syllable to shorten it: nine point six and one one five point two so I guess it saved two syllables. But two syllables saved is not worth the confusion power of 10 prefixes in comms has caused over the years.

GrumpyCanadian maybe @Hydraglass was right; blame the technical dolts from the 1950s and 1960s

Not for cooping the metric prefixes, but yeah, they should be blamed for the inconsistency in regards to communication speeds (HD sizes came later).

GrumpyCanadian o further muddy this discussion, there is even the old debate about what constitutes a “byte”.

Yup. There’s also some old iron that has 9 bit bytes and 36 bit words. I’ve relatively recently had a debate over 8-bit bytes being the de-facto standard in a certain “hacker” forum. Stopped participating there as the regulars were the worse bunch of inflexible close minded pedants I’ve ever interacted with..

digitalfutur

px_eliezer_ or “odometer (reading). Or simply “kilometres” like the box says on my GM service records.

Avernar

px_eliezer_ So NOT everything based on 10 is automatically good.

Yup. Metric time for greater than a second sucks. Metric time for a second or smaller is great.

GrumpyCanadian

px_eliezer_ It’s why virtually no one says “Kilometerage” instead of “Mileage”.

We certainly do in French. In looking for a used or off-lease car, one would likely see ads claiming something like “bas kilométrage”. It’s probably just linguistic inertia and that infernal influence from a certain country that have kept the old word in common use. The latter may experience a shift, now that a certain politician has damaged relationships and attitudes toward said country are changing.

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