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Even before the Norman Conquest, the English foot was decreed to equal the length of 36 barleycorns laid end to end. The 10th century King Edgar ordered that the legal yard was the distance from the tip of his nose to the end of his middle finger. From such whims grew the system of weights and measures that has bogged down the English-speaking world in the non-decimal swamp of pounds and ounces, bushels and pecks, acres and furlongs. The simpler system of meters, grams and liters, invented in France around 1800, spread through Napoleonic Europe in the early 19th century; it is now used by more than 90% of the earth's population.

Even the British, who started it all, plan to complete converting to the metric system by 1975. The National Bureau of Standards is now mulling the question of U.S. conversion. While its report is not due until next summer, some guesses are that the U.S. might need as much as 20 years and billions of dollars to switch. The U.S. is already the sole major industrial power that is neither using the metric system nor committed to adopting it. The only other countries that still refuse to abandon the ancient and intricate English measurements are Ceylon, Gambia, Guyana, Jamaica, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

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