Science & Arts

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Austrians have officially given up the becher and the pfiff as units of volume. The Soviets likewise no longer use the zolotnik and the funt for weight. So why do Americans cling to such archaic units of measurement as the pound, bushel and inch? Our system of units, a modification of the so-called British imperial system, which even Britain has largely abandoned, is complicated. Converting from inches to feet requires dividing by twelve, (quick, how many feet is 97 inches?); going from pounds to ounces calls for multiplying by 16. By comparison, the metric system is a breeze: just move the decimal point, and, presto! five meters equals 500 centimeters equals .005 kilometers.

Besides Burma, the U.S. is the only nation in the world that has not formally begun converting to metric. There was a time, while Britain was the U.S.'s major trading partner, when it would have been economic suicide to consider switching to metric. In fact, it was precisely such arguments that torpedoed Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson's proposal that the U.S. adopt a decimal-based system in 1790. A study 31 years later by his successor, John Quincy Adams, was similarly unpersuasive. But in 1866, Congress, charged by the Constitution with establishing the nation's weights and measures, declared the metric system valid for "contracts, dealings or court proceedings," and in 1893 officially defined the foot, pound and inch in metric equivalents.

Finally, by the 1960s, most of the rest of the world had gone or was going / metric. Congress responded with legislation, and in 1975, after years of debate, the Metric Conversion Act became law. The U. S. finally appeared ready for a decisive entry into a new metric era.

Sure enough, signs in both miles and kilometers started to spring up on highways, along with posters exhorting drivers to THINK METRIC. Service stations started pumping gas by the liter. And consumers began to get queasy. "You didn't know how much you wanted, you didn't know how much you got, and you didn't know how much you paid for it," sympathizes G.T. Underwood, director of the Commerce Department's Office of Metric Programs. "But you knew you felt pretty bad about the metric system."

Why did metrification falter? Most believe it was because compliance with the Metric Act was purely voluntary. Indeed, about all the law did was establish a metric board to help manage the anticipated rush to conversion. From the start, the board had a built-in problem: in the interest of fairness, it was set up to reflect opposing points of view. But as a result, its deliberations repeatedly ended in deadlock. "Lining up for the metric system were the multinational corporations, the scientific community and educators," recalls Underwood. "Opposed were a great many consumers, who saw it as placing undue stress on them: Why confuse a lot of people just for the sake of having the same system the Europeans use? The labor unions were also generally opposed because they felt it would distress trained workers, and that going metric would allow imported foreign-made goods to become even more acceptable."

Still, the board took its show on the road. "They traveled around the country, meeting in public halls," says Underwood. "Many of their meetings were quite acrimonious. People who came to them tended to be the naysayers, so the impression was that most of the public feed-back was strongly negative." The board, though legally still on the books, lasted just four years. In 1982 the Office of Metric Programs was created to move the responsibilities of the metric board to the Department of Commerce. Budget and staffing were cut, from $3 million to $300,000 and subsequently reduced even further.

These days, conversion to metric is just a vaguely unpleasant memory for most consumers. The highway signs are largely gone, and the pumps dole out gas mostly by the gallon again. The few visible monuments to metric conversion include liter bottles of soda and liquor, time-and-temperature signs that * still flash degrees in Celsius, and gram equivalents on food containers.

The metric system is alive and well, on the other hand, in many areas where it makes sense. An estimated 25% of U.S. manufacturers are metric; more than 60% of FORTUNE 500 companies produce at least some metric products, in contrast to between 10% and 20% in the early 1970s. The automobile industry, for example, is almost entirely metric.

The changeover to the metric system, in other words, need not be an all-or- nothing proposition -- a remarkably sensible perspective. After all, the reasons for conversion are economic: it is important for U.S. industry to compete in international markets, but there is no particular value in changing the weather report on the nightly news. For most Americans, it seems, an ounce of prevention was worth a kilogram of cure.

With reporting by David Bjerklie/New York