Renaissance Redneck: Measure for measure

By David Kittredge
As I go about my daily life, I find now that when repairing mechanical devices, most of which made abroad, I am forced to use metric wrenches. I usually have to make many trips back and forth to the toolbox as I try to guess the correct size of the anticipated wrench or socket needed. I try to appease my predicament with the thought that at least the physical exercise is good for me. Trying to select the still foreign, to me, millimeter-sized tools is unfortunately, an old dog, new tricks conundrum for this soon to be reswaddled Baby Boomer.

In 1975, the U.S Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act, spurring efforts to change the distance road signs from the English system of miles to the metric system of clicks. One click is one kilometer or 0.621 miles. We stubborn opponents of this change kicked and screamed using the argument that this move would be very costly, having to replace the millions of road signs along our highways and byways to the metric system. Our argument was one of bait and switch, in that psychologically we were afraid of the proposed conversion, but rather than admit it, we argued the money aspect.

For seven years, until 1982, the U.S. populace was bombarded with government, tax dollar-backed, propagandized television commercials trying to convince us that the metric conversion was the sensical choice to bring the U.S. into a globally synchronized system of measurement.

But most of us, who were mentally clothed in the foot, yard, and 5,280 feet per mile syndrome, hunkered down fearing the worst, the decimal system, where all measurements are based on quantities of 10. In fact, if the metric system of road sign distances had been implemented, I am sure I would have become comfortable with it by now, 46 years later. I sure hate to rush into things.

Of course, the metric system has crept into our daily lives, used in food container measurements, foreign cars with the metric-sized bolts and nuts, and most mechanical contraptions we use today. Here I have been forced to throw in a whole roll of Bounty towels, in submission.

It has long been known that trying to teach grade school children the English system of measurement including the 12-inch ruler is difficult at best. Where the metric system of measurement is an apples for apples problem, the English Imperial system is an apples, for lemons, for cherries predicament where a child’s mind often ends up spinning like the fruited wheels of a slot machine trying to mesh the sixteenths, quarters and inches into a flowing stream of consciousness and rational thought.

Whenever I have to combine the fractions of our 12-inch ruler I have converted the “unruly” fractions to their decimal equivalents, especially when dividing or multiplying fractions and then convert back to the English system. Mine is a circuitous route, but it is laden with accuracy.

Upon reaching high school physics class we were first introduced to the metric system of measurement used on our slide rulers to calculate vast or minuscule sums. These slide rules can still be purchased on the internet with the qualifier of being collectable or vintage. With that thought, I realize that I probably fit into the vintage genre, but probably not so much in the collectible category.

I first heard of battery-powered calculators while in the Mare Island U.S. Naval Nuclear Power School, in the mid-1970s. Our mathematics instructor pridefully held up his newly acquired “kangaroo pouch-sized” pocket calculator, in an ostentatious classroom act of show and tell, confessing that he had paid the princely sum of $3,000 for the device. I and my classmates groaned in unison; our monthly pay back then was just a tick over $400. I was stuck with my vintage but collectable side rule then and until the early eighties, when a scientific calculator could be purchased for $30.

In further madcap measurement histrionics, the age old saying, “A pint’s a pound the world around,” which is a veiled explanation that there are 16 ounces to a pint and 16 ounces to a pound no longer stands. Some ice cream makers have now deemed that a “pint” of ice cream can be weighed and sold at 14 ounces. The age-old adage has been purloined from the dairy aisle, carted out of the grocery store and left to melt and curdle in the heat of the mid-day sun in a vacant scrabble lot somewhere on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Fourteen ounces to the pint today, will it be 14 ounces to the pound tomorrow?

Oh, the humanity!