The Metric And Other Measuring Systems
June 1, 2020 at 6:39 p.m.
By -
The units were the grain, scruple, dram, ounce and pound. It was brought to the United States from England during the colonial period. It has now largely been replaced in pharmacy by the metric system. A pharmacist had to learn how to convert one system to the other, 32 fluid ounces were equivalent to one liter, 16 fluid ounces equaled 500 milliliters, one fluid dram was equivalent to 5 milliliters and 15 minims or drops equaled one milliliter. One grain was equivalent to 60 milligrams.
While pharmacists may have been an exception, the United States in general uses the Imperial system of measurement even though it may be a competitive disadvantage when dealing in international markets.
The United States, together with Myanmar (Burma) and Liberia, have not adopted the International System of Units (SI or metric system) as their official system of weights and measures, although all three countries do use elements of the metric system.
The Imperial system includes ounces, inches, feet, miles, gallons and Fahrenheit, which are unfamiliar in most of the world. Most of the measurements were traced back to the length of body parts or everyday items. These units are not easily divisible in parts of hundreds or thousands and thus are inferior to those in the metric system.
Much of the world adopted the metric system years ago, thanks to France.
The metric system was developed in the 1790s during the French Revolution, the idea addressed the inconsistent and incompatible traditional systems of weights and measures which varied across countries or even across a single country’s regions. It was the radical nature of the revolution that allowed the metric system to gain traction. After defining the conditions of the metric system, control was turned over to an international body, and by 1875, most industrialized nations agreed to the Treaty of the Metre, which founded the International Bureau of Weights and Measures that led to the metric system we know of today.
The base units of the International System include meter for length, kilogram for mass, second for time, ampere for electrical current, Kelvin for temperature, mole for amount of substance and candela for luminous intensity. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) part of the United States Department of Commerce publishes the English language version translation of Le Systeme International d’Unites.
Many factors played a role in frustrating the adoption of the metric system in the United States, but much of the opposition from the 1870s onward came from the manufacturers of high end machine tools. They based their entire system - which encompassed everything from lathes to devices for cutting screw threads on the inch. Retooling, they argued, was prohibitively expensive and the successfully blocked the adoption of the metric system in Congress on a number of occasions in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
In some respects using the inch made sense, it could be divided in ways comprehensible to machinists. It was built around “2s” rather than “10s”, with each inch subdivided in half and in half again and so forth. This permitted various sizes of screw threads to have some logical correspondence to all the other increments. In fairness, we now have a hybrid system, most American rulers show inches along one side and centimeters along the other. (One inch equals 2.54 centimeters.)
According to John Marciano in his book, “Whatever Happened to the Metric System?,” the United States was an original signatory party to the 1875 Treaty of the Meter, which established the General Conference of Weights and Measures, the International Committee of Weighs and Measures and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.
Even earlier, the Act of July 28, 1866, authorized the use of metric measurement standards in the United States. Subsequent to those earlier efforts, there was passage of the 1975 Metric Conversion Act meant to guide America through the process of abandoning its customary measures for metric ones. The idea was to make metric the preferred system of weights and measures but the plan never caught on.
Final Thoughts
It is interesting to know that all seven units in the International System of Units are no longer defined by material objects and instead are defined only by abstract constants of nature. The kilogram representing mass, for example, was formerly represented by a sleek cylinder of platinum-iridium metal kept in an underground vault in Paris. The meter had been defined as the distance between two scratches on that bar. However, physical objects are subject to damage, and scientists looked for standard units of measurement that remain constant albeit more complicated. The meter is now defined in terms of the universally constant speed of light. It is now defined as the distance traveled by a beam of light in exactly 1/299,792,458th of a second. The second is the amount of time it takes an atom of cesium-133 to vibrate 9,192,631,770 times. The kilogram is now defined as a specific number of silicon atoms.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. His new book “Science Snippets” is available from Amazon and other book sellers. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
The units were the grain, scruple, dram, ounce and pound. It was brought to the United States from England during the colonial period. It has now largely been replaced in pharmacy by the metric system. A pharmacist had to learn how to convert one system to the other, 32 fluid ounces were equivalent to one liter, 16 fluid ounces equaled 500 milliliters, one fluid dram was equivalent to 5 milliliters and 15 minims or drops equaled one milliliter. One grain was equivalent to 60 milligrams.
While pharmacists may have been an exception, the United States in general uses the Imperial system of measurement even though it may be a competitive disadvantage when dealing in international markets.
The United States, together with Myanmar (Burma) and Liberia, have not adopted the International System of Units (SI or metric system) as their official system of weights and measures, although all three countries do use elements of the metric system.
The Imperial system includes ounces, inches, feet, miles, gallons and Fahrenheit, which are unfamiliar in most of the world. Most of the measurements were traced back to the length of body parts or everyday items. These units are not easily divisible in parts of hundreds or thousands and thus are inferior to those in the metric system.
Much of the world adopted the metric system years ago, thanks to France.
The metric system was developed in the 1790s during the French Revolution, the idea addressed the inconsistent and incompatible traditional systems of weights and measures which varied across countries or even across a single country’s regions. It was the radical nature of the revolution that allowed the metric system to gain traction. After defining the conditions of the metric system, control was turned over to an international body, and by 1875, most industrialized nations agreed to the Treaty of the Metre, which founded the International Bureau of Weights and Measures that led to the metric system we know of today.
The base units of the International System include meter for length, kilogram for mass, second for time, ampere for electrical current, Kelvin for temperature, mole for amount of substance and candela for luminous intensity. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) part of the United States Department of Commerce publishes the English language version translation of Le Systeme International d’Unites.
Many factors played a role in frustrating the adoption of the metric system in the United States, but much of the opposition from the 1870s onward came from the manufacturers of high end machine tools. They based their entire system - which encompassed everything from lathes to devices for cutting screw threads on the inch. Retooling, they argued, was prohibitively expensive and the successfully blocked the adoption of the metric system in Congress on a number of occasions in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
In some respects using the inch made sense, it could be divided in ways comprehensible to machinists. It was built around “2s” rather than “10s”, with each inch subdivided in half and in half again and so forth. This permitted various sizes of screw threads to have some logical correspondence to all the other increments. In fairness, we now have a hybrid system, most American rulers show inches along one side and centimeters along the other. (One inch equals 2.54 centimeters.)
According to John Marciano in his book, “Whatever Happened to the Metric System?,” the United States was an original signatory party to the 1875 Treaty of the Meter, which established the General Conference of Weights and Measures, the International Committee of Weighs and Measures and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.
Even earlier, the Act of July 28, 1866, authorized the use of metric measurement standards in the United States. Subsequent to those earlier efforts, there was passage of the 1975 Metric Conversion Act meant to guide America through the process of abandoning its customary measures for metric ones. The idea was to make metric the preferred system of weights and measures but the plan never caught on.
Final Thoughts
It is interesting to know that all seven units in the International System of Units are no longer defined by material objects and instead are defined only by abstract constants of nature. The kilogram representing mass, for example, was formerly represented by a sleek cylinder of platinum-iridium metal kept in an underground vault in Paris. The meter had been defined as the distance between two scratches on that bar. However, physical objects are subject to damage, and scientists looked for standard units of measurement that remain constant albeit more complicated. The meter is now defined in terms of the universally constant speed of light. It is now defined as the distance traveled by a beam of light in exactly 1/299,792,458th of a second. The second is the amount of time it takes an atom of cesium-133 to vibrate 9,192,631,770 times. The kilogram is now defined as a specific number of silicon atoms.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. His new book “Science Snippets” is available from Amazon and other book sellers. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
Have a news tip? Email [email protected] or Call/Text 360-922-3092