Whatever Happened to the Metric System?: How America Kept Its Feet

Read ! Whatever Happened to the Metric System?: How America Kept Its Feet PDF by * John Bemelmans Marciano eBook or Kindle ePUB Online free. Whatever Happened to the Metric System?: How America Kept Its Feet Of course we wont be truly metric until your favorite team kicks off at the 50 meter line and according to George G. McDonald. An interesting revelation of the development of metric measure as a parochial (French) system to widespread adoption except in the US. Metric measure has long been legal for commerce in the US but only slowly adopted here. Wine, spirits and even beer (Coors) are now dispensed in liters or milliliters; we (some of us) trot along 5K runs; even measuring cups sold at Wal

Whatever Happened to the Metric System?: How America Kept Its Feet

Author :
Rating : 4.16 (709 Votes)
Asin : B00S00OINC
Format Type :
Number of Pages : 320 Pages
Publish Date : 2014-03-14
Language : English

DESCRIPTION:

Anyone who listens to this inquisitive, engaging story will never read Robert Frost's line "miles to go before I sleep" or eat a foot-long sub again without wondering, "Whatever happened to the metric system?". So how did we end up with it? Most of the rest of the world is on the metric system, and for a time in the 1970s America appeared ready to make the switch. The American standard system of measurement is a unique and odd thing to behold, with its esoteric, inconsistent standards: 12 inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, 16 ounces in a pound, 100 pennies to the dollar. As much as it is a tale of quarters and tenths, it is a human drama, replete with great inventors, visionary presidents, obsessive activists, and science-loving technocrats. Yet it never happened, and the reasons for that get to the root of who we think we are, just as the measurements are woven into the ways we think. John Marciano chronicles the origins of measurement systems, the kaleidoscopic array of standards thro

"Of course we won't be truly metric until your favorite team kicks off at the 50 meter line and" according to George G. McDonald. An interesting revelation of the development of metric measure as a parochial (French) system to widespread adoption except in the US. Metric measure has long been legal for commerce in the US but only slowly adopted here. Wine, spirits and even beer (Coors) are now dispensed in liters or milliliters; we (some of us) trot along 5K runs; even measuring cups sold at Walmart are marked in milliliters. Of course we won't be truly metric until your favorite team kicks off at the 50 meter line and the car manufacturers provide a magic button to switch your (now electronic) dashboard display from miles/hr a. "I particularly enjoyed the history of original measurement units" according to Kent Price. The book contains lots of good detail, reasons, and history of measurement. Original measurement units were based on the human body; feet, inches, span, or fathoms (based on the length of rope pulled in by a seaman). The book recounts this "natural" basis of measurements, and proposals for standard units with a metric system (units based on multiples of 10). The adoption has been very political, with the United States still not formally changing over. The metric conversion is now somewhat academic, with the computer able to make instant conversions. This is not to say there are no screw-ups, such as . carebear said Interesting but drawn out. I made it about half way through this book. The beginning was promising - walking through the history of measurements from the minting of coinage to the invention of the decimal system. I particularly enjoyed learning the very practical methods that were historically used for measurement (for example, the amount of land that an oxen could till in a day was an acre). The book also walks through the influence that the American and French revolutions had on the adoption of new measurement standards, including interesting bits of history on politicians such as Thomas Jefferson and scientists like Lavoisi

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