A decent, interesting narrative history of the metric system, it's adoption by most of the world, and its rejection (mostly) by the United States of America. But, along with the metric system, it talks about time zones, clocks, calendar reform, coinage, and a whole host of other utopian and unifying schemes mostly dreamed up by dreamy-eyed progressive idealists.

Marciano explains some of the usefulness and utility of the old way of doing things with its 16s, 12s, 8s, 4s, 3s, and 2s and its ½, ¾, ¼, ⅛, et cetera. He explains some of the idiocy of the 10s of metric. So what 10 cm is 1 dm. Nobody uses decimeters, or dekameters, much less megameters or femtometers, or megagrams, or femtograms, or whatever.

And, the British still have their pints of beer. God bless 'em. Oh God, it bothers me that good ol' American bourbon comes in 750 ml bottles.... By God! American whiskey should be sold in fifths. (A fifth of a US liquid gallon, or 25 3⁄5 US fluid ounces.) They are cheating you out of 7 ml of whiskey! And, please, please, please, people, stop calling U.S. measurements "imperial." They ain't the same.

Anyway. It's a good book, well-researched and well-written. A dumb error in Appendix A (p. 269) makes you worry about the rest of the book: a ton is not 1000 lb., it is 2000 lbs.

I will finish with a nice paean to America's continued use of the good old measures (p. 267), which sums up everything nicely:

"But when it comes to how our measures do matter, the important thing about keeping them alive is that they provide an alternate way of thinking. The usefulness of the metric system doesn't change the fact that it is incredibly artificial. Worse, its universality leads to the notion that decimals are the only way of perceiving the world.

"In the Babylonian sixtieths, Roman twelfths, and medieval halves, quarters, and eighths there is the logic and genius of countless generations of people coming to grasp the world around them, the same way there is logic and genius in the Enlightenment tenths, hundredths, and thousandths of the metric system. What is good about the latter does not negate what is good about the former.

"Such arguments are taken as self-evident when it comes to vanishing languages or other living heritages that are endangered. America is preserving ways of thinking that were once common to all humanity, and if we get rid of our measures we will never bring them back. To be for a metric America is to be for a global monoculture.

"So how is it that those who cheer José Bove's smashing of a McDonald's and blame the United States for the Coca-Colanization of the planet would want this to happen? How can Americans be stupid, ignorant, and lazy for knowing only one language, and also be those same things for having two systems of measurement? It is because not being metric plays into the idea that America thinks of itself as not having to play by the same rules as the rest of the world. This may be a fair enough criticism in other cases, but not this one.

"America has never gone metric because it never had to, and every other country did. Most of them converted while undergoing regime changes, industrializing, and trying to make their people literate and numerate. It used to be that diversity was the enemy of a better life; we now live in an age where the villain has become uniformity."

Huzzah the old measures. Down with the metric system! ( )

I've never given the metric system much thought. It's something I learned in the 70's, back when we were sure the U.S. was going to convert by the end of the decade. It seemed easier to learn and at that time I probably could have handled the change just fine.

The conversion never really happened, not in my day to day life. I never saw kilometers on the road signs (unless I was close to the border) and gradually the cars stopped listing how many kilometers per hour you were driving and just stuck to miles. I could read the milliliters on the bottles at the grocery store which I assumed was for international trade. I knew you needed a set of metric wrenches to work on cars which might be all or partially metric.

And, of course, I remember the wrecked rocket ship on Mars, which was the result of the space program using both metric and US customary measures. ("Oh, you meant miles! Ooooh. . . .") Yeh, heads had to have rolled because of that.

When I saw this book I thought it would be interesting to find out just why the United States refused to go metric. I'm still not completely sure. It sounds like we resisted. We didn't compromise an inch! Well, we actually did, though not the actual "inch". The United States went metric in some areas and in others, it just didn't matter. We don't mind a 750 ml bottle of wine or whiskey (though I still hear people say "a fifth of whiskey" which is bizarre to me - 757.08 ml or 1/5 of a liquid gallon) but apparently the cost of converting all the gas pumps to metric during the fuel crisis did not go over well. I don't remember the protests. I learned my math at school and when nothing happened - well, I moved on. (Now, if I had to learn my temperature in Celsius or my mileage in kilometers, I would struggle. I'd be forever converting in my head like a foreign language.)

The U.S., being isolated from Europe and not as much involved in most of the foreign wars after the push for decimalization and the metric system in the late 1700's did not have as pressing of a need for the metric system in people's daily lives. (We weren't becoming members of the EU.) The computer age made so much of the math easier, too.

I learned some very interesting things. A mile is 5,280 feet because a mile is not really related to the foot. A mile is 8 furlongs and is related to the acre and the plowing of land. There was a movement to change the calendar so all the months were fairly equal and the same date would fall on the same day of the week in every month and year. That didn't die out until 1955. (That would be horribly hard to learn and adjust to.) Decimalization is fairly new, as far as how we use it and discuss it. I can't imagine a time when people would routinely say "one and half pounds" and not think of it as 1 point 5 pounds. There were lots of other interesting tidbits.

I'm almost embarrassed I had never really thought about most of this! It was a good choice for a non-fiction book. ( )