Give Them an Inch
Enough with US units please
I posted the following snippet from an old sewing teaching manual on Mastodon recently:
[A tape measure is a strip of painted tape, usually one] and a half yards in length, divided up into inches and the parts of inches. As an intimate knowledge of the tape measure is required to perform the work outlined in the following pages, pupils are urged at the outset to learn how many inches are in a yard, a half yard, and a quarter yard, and what fractional parts of a yard are represented by 27, 18, 9, 4½, 2¼ inches.
— Home and school sewing, Frances Patton, 1901, via the Internet Archive.
I included the caption “I would simply learn and use a system of measurement that made sense”. This was intended as a joke, but it’s also something I feel unusually strongly about—and I have the itch to over-explain.
Consider the humble inch. At 25-and-a-bit millimetres it’s a good length, I have nothing against it, but it’s not inherently better or worse than the centimetre for what it does. Still, it’s fine.
I actually kind of like the whole ½ inch, ¼ inch, ⅛ inch thing. Powers of two aren’t just for computers, they have other applications like folding cloth and suchlike, so a unit you can halve repeatedly is kind of neat.1 And of course you can double it like anything else, to make 2 inches, 4 inches, etcetera.
But eventually you need another unit in the hierarchy, a word for some multiple of an inch that we can use at a larger scale. If I were building up the system from the basis we’ve just established I’d throw one in as early as 8 inches or as late as 1024. But the foot,2 as we all know, is… twelve inches.
Recovering from the shock of the additional prime factor, twelve isn’t that bad. We still get whole numbers of inches after folding it in half—twice—but also if we fold in thrice, famously an issue in a strictly decimal context. So I can see the attraction, I just kind of wish we had a base-12 number system to begin with if going that route.
So what’s next, 144 inches to the next unit up? No, a yard is just three feet, or 36 inches. A yard is also where I fall off when it comes to this unit series, as I know feet and inches almost entirely due to older relatives asking me how tall I had become as a child. The yard, for reasons that are beyond me, is never part of that system, and so people are five-foot-ten or six-foot-four, and never one-yard-two-foot-ten or two-yards-four. A yard, to me therefore, is just a metre that gave up at 90% of the way there.3
Next—and I always have to look this up—next is the mile, which is one thousand seven hundred and sixty yards.4 This distance, which I tend to think of as a rather long kilometre, has a prime factorisation of five much-needed 2’s (at least for my quixotic scheme), a 5, and an inexplicable 11. Who came up with that? Answers on a wax diptych, presumably.5
I’ve avoided ascribing inches and miles and so-forth to the “Imperial System” in this rant thus far, because that’s honestly a big part of the problem. My (now alas quite elderly) relatives grew up with and still sometimes default to the system of that name that was standardised in Britain in the first half of the 19th century. The non-metric values I come across these days, mostly via the internet, are overwhelmingly American and thus using the system that is never named for some reason: US Customary Units.
This is not complete pedantry. While the length and weight units are the same,6 volume is a mess. A ‘cup’, for example, in a recipe could be 250 mLs, 240 mLs, or 237 mLs, or multiple other possibilities. I’m glad I don’t bake, where I hear precise ratios are kind of important. Goodness knows what a ‘fluid ounce’ is supposed to be.
At about this point people usually mention the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999, famously caused by American unit-related confusion. That is all very well and good but this is not a logical rant. In truth I am more bothered by the American exceptionalism of it all—I strongly suspect that even the partial failure to metricate in the UK would never have stood if the Americans hadn’t backed out of their already belated transition 45 years ago. Only the dominant commercial and geopolitical power could get away with half a century of using an incompatible unit system to the rest of the world, for it is in trade and commerce (even, I contend, above science) that a seamlessly comparable world-wide system is most critical. Any less-powerful country would simply find itself locked out of the whole network.
I know we have more important things to worry about, but it bothers me to see untranslated customary units that aren’t in historical documents. I hate to generalise (or I would normally, except now I’m in the flow of it) but Americans seem to feel it’s their right to be catered to on this and the rest of us have to figure out whether ‘60 degrees’ is dangerously hot or quite temperate.
Maybe I should just stop consuming American media entirely, but as hinted above I’ve been looking at sewing materials. I’ll forgive public-domain manuals like the one at the start of this post, silly though it may be, for predating the switch in most English-speaking countries. Unfortunately though it looks like it’s non-trivial to buy a sewing pattern here that isn’t from the US ‘big four’, and thus fails to consistently state metric conversions of inch/foot/yard values on the English side of the front paper (at least you can check the French/Spanish). Maybe the liquidation of their parent company will make space for alternatives, but I kind of doubt it.
It’s late and I’ve run out of rant, thank goodness. Nevertheless, this is something I feel remarkably strongly about. Maybe seeing my contemporaries hold on to feet and inches just makes me feel old? Unit choice isn’t something that has historically been a bottom-up choice, so I guess I can’t blame individual people for choosing to use them.
Still going to judge though.
I’ll return to the topic of sewing another time. Right now I’m all grand plans and no results, which has been the story of my entire winter, alas.
And I like the pattern the divisions make on a ruler, not that I’ve ever tried to use them in anger.↩︎
Another issue with the ‘foot’ is that feet are real things (most people have one), but they are rarely the right size.↩︎
Actually a percent or so more, but I only remember that because I know that six feet is 183 cm, because see above.↩︎
Yes I know that there are fathoms and chains and whatever in the middle, but while the yard is sometimes omitted the fathom seems to be reserved for boats and historical fiction and the intersection thereof.↩︎
Though Today I Learned, from double checking this, that the Roman ‘mille’ for which this unit was ultimately named was defined as a thousand paces, or five thousand of Marcus Agrippa’s feet. Goodness knows where the extra 280 feet came from in the system the English ultimately ended up using.↩︎
Though only since 1959, with the (imo, at least) hilariously-named International Yard and Pound Agreement, which defined them in terms of the metric system anyway.↩︎