Would it have been better to stay with the British Imperial system of measurement?

Question

Today, we have pints, litres, feet and metres. If you drive, distances are in miles and yards, if you buy furniture it's in millimetres. We have the stupid term of "one pence" and "two pence" instead of "a penny" or "tuppence" and weights measured in grammes.

Notice that commerce chooses to use the smallest measurements hoping the public will believe they are getting a lot for their money.

Kids these days are not so hot at maths. I think they were better at it in the old pounds, shillings and pence days, because they had to think a lot harder when dealing with money.

Ask a car dealer about the petrol consumption of a car and he will give it as say, 30 miles per gallon because it sounds much better than 6 miles per litre.

So is it time to scrap the decimal system and go back to the far more sensible Imperial System?

Answer 1

The metric system has nothing to do with the introduction of computers, they use the binary system.

The metric system has been used in science for a long time now and the reason is that science needed an international measurement system so that scientific results could be shared and verified across the world.

BUT, in engineering, the metric system is very weak. The metric system of threads, for instance, is far too coarse for fine engineering, that's why the BA (British Association) thread is used in electrical instrumentation and BSF (British Standard Fine) is used where very thin metal is required to take a thread.

If you have a piece of metal that is one millimeter thick, and you need to have a threaded hole in it, the metric system is no good because you wouldn't get more than one turn of thread in it, whereas the imperial system would provide the ability to have many more.

Plumbing also has its own BSP system . Thread profiles change with the aformentioned systems too.

Road vehicles, which require about the lowest form of commercial engineering and technology, use the metric system because it makes them easy to export. The average car costs about £300 to make in materials, yes £300, and they aren't built to last, so precision engineering and materials aren't required.

I doubt whether there are many metric threads in a Rolls Royce jet engine! Britain is famous for its engineering abilities and that's because we have a wide range of systems tailored for each kind of job.

As far as the monetary system is concerned, those who are frightened of the old system of pounds shillings and pence are just mentally lazy, and I agree that the decimal system, like everything nowadays, has produced a generation or two of dumbos! The younger generation wants everything served up on a silver plate.

In any case, decimal currency was introduced into the UK because the conservative government wanted to drag us into the Common Market, not because it was a better system.

We would be far better off out of the EU and back with the systems that made Britain Great! (All Cheer!)

Answer 2

I don't think so. Whilst I agree that kids are not as good at maths as they used to be, and I accept that this might be, in part, because they don't have to think so hard, I don't feel that reverting to a complex monetary system can be justified when a simple one is already in place.

However, I also feel that we mustn't continue to sit on the fence. Whilst not being a pro-European, we must go one way or the other, and my view is that we should go metric.
Naturally there will be some confusion at first but they will soon iron themselves out just as they did when we changed our currency.

Regarding the 'car dealer' thing, I'm afraid it would be more complicated than the example you have put forward. It would be kilometres per litre not miles per litre. To make matters worse, I believe the Europeans express it the other way round. IE litres per kilometre so this would mean the lower the figure, the better.

I may be wrong on this last point, but if I am, I'm sure our European friends will put me right on this.

Answer 3

In principle, I agree entirely but, only where the older folk are concerned. School kids today should be taught metric but also given some insight to Imperial and taught conversion factors.
All Imperial figures should be quoted alongside the metric so that the older people will not have to be bothered by trying to convert.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I've worked in the Oil and Gas industry for over 50 years (30 years in overseas locations), and have studied and learned to convert from UK to US to Metric in just about all aspects. I feel sorry for those who have not been given the same education.
What I'm not happy about is the business of Mass and Weight etc.
My 'Mass' is 11 stone = 154 pounds = 70kg but, now,
I can't say that. If I'm asked "What is you weight"?
I can't say "70kilos". I have to say multiply by 9.81 and say,
"I weigh 686.7 Newtons, but my Mass is 70kg" ..

Keep the Newtons...etc for the Scientific calculations....!!!

Answer 4

This is just the opinion of a technologist, but I think the world would be far better off with the metric system. Everything is measured in factors of ten and the only real thing to learn is some latin terms for "hundred", "thousand" and "million".

British and American systems of measurement seem, to me, to be nothing more than the outcome of hundreds of years of British/French competition. Each developed a measurement system in which the goods engineered by one could not easily be reproduced by the other. Engineers love to do this - the prime example is the common machine screw. The original design was slotted. Then a cross shaped design came along and now it is indented and ridged. Each requires a special tool to unfasten. Without this tool, the screw may as well be a nail. Screws also just happen to be the preferred way of holding the pannels of most things together. Remove the pannels, and the design is quite evident, not to mention being easy to copy.

Business drives engineering, and in the business world everything is privately owned, patented and stored in a bank vault. This is the direct opposite of science where ideas are shared in the hopes of further discovery. Sadly, Anglo/American culture is working hard to bring science into the business sphere. It might be profitable for a few, but it is surely a blow to human discovery as a whole.

Answer 5

This is really an issue only for the English-speaking world. The scientific and technical community, which drives much innovative progress worldwide, adopted the metric system long ago. Willful ignorance of luddite elements among the rank and file is an impediment to communication and participation in development and understanding, scientifically, culturally, and technically.

Your 10 fingers are a metric-decimal counting device...would you amputate digits to accomodate the arcane rules of 4's and 8's prevalent in the Imperial system?

Answer 6

With approximately 300 million people in the United States, most of whom can't count or do simple math now, why should we start to convert to the metric system and screw up the whole country?
The answer is no, the metric system is not any more accurate, so why bother.?

Answer 7

If only. The unhandiness of metric sticks out all the time - even now after 30 years when only metric has been taught in school, most children automatically give their height in feet and their weight in stones. We still drive in miles and prefer to drink in pints. On the Continent after 200 years of metric they still (in various languages) call 500g a pound - which it approximates to - and the Italians had a motor race called the Mille Miglia. Why the bureaucrats from Bonaparte on insist on trying to swim uphill defeats me.

Answer 8

I think it needs to be one or the other. We have miles, metres, pints, litres, stone, kilos, inches, cm etc. The government need to pick one and stick with it.

Personally I favour the Metric system because it is simpler - why make things harder for yourself?

Answer 9

I think the metric system would be a good standardization, but most Americans would be against it out of pure frustration during the conversion. I think keeping things the way they are is the way to go.

Answer 10

The move to metrication coincided with the development of the electronic calculator and, ultimately, the digital computer. If we had continued using imperial measurements, instead of using a single base-10 system, the future of computing would have been delayed for years.