I originally wanted to call this section "Pieces of string too short to save", after the punch line of a Maine story about a notable packrat, who had a box in his attic with that label on it. The idea is that you don't throw things away just because there's no apparent use for them. In this context, there are a whole bunch of items that we don't sell, and ideas that aren't in any of our books or tapes, and even things that have nothing to do with rigging at all, but are too nifty or unusual or odd to ignore.Back to Fairleads Index
July 2000
The Metric System: Pidgin Measurement In the last century, the world leapt to adopt many radically new things: airplanes; automobiles; computers; phones; and television, to name just a few. When introduced, these things upset ancient patterns of life, and came with the usual array of unintended consequences, but we jumped for them anyway, because they gave us something we really wanted, for better or for worse. And this is a familiar phenomenon, throughout human history. Oh, sometimes we're a little slow on the uptake, but just about by definition, we don't need to be forced into accepting things that work. That brings us to the subject of this month's Fair Leads. What I'll be addressing here is a tool that has long been touted as being a vast improvement over its predecessors, as being simple and easy and logical, yet which has never been accepted, anywhere, except by force of law, and which, after more than 200 years of con�certed propagandizing effort, appears to have reached its peak of acceptance, and is beginning a slide into obscurity. That tool is the Metric System.
I know, I know, we've all been told since infancy about the supposed advantages of this system, and about the supposed barbaric inefficiencies of conventional measure, but stay with me a while here. Most of the supposed advantages of Metrics are shared by conventional measure. Most of the so-called inefficiencies and illogic of conventional measure are either obscure aspects that almost no one uses, or actual advantages, that have gone unrecognized in the rush to Metrication. In short, Metric measuring isn't nearly as good as it's cracked up to be, and conventional measure is a lot better than typically assessed. This is true right through both systems, so it's tough to decide where to start in detail. So I'll commence with one of my favorites: Temperature.
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was a German-born scientist, inventor of the first practical thermometer. His first big technological breakthrough was in discovering the effect of barometric pressure on the boiling point of water. In order to have a meaningful standard temperature for this point, he came up with a standard barometric pressure. The other big breakthrough was in establishing the freezing point of water. Here he discovered that a liquid can exist in three states simultaneously, the so-called �triple point�. That is, a substance can be in the process of freezing, in the process of melting, and actually frozen, all at once, in equilibrium. Nailing this point down had been beyond previous researchers, who had been trying in vain for an absolute point.
With these two fundamental parameters established for the fundamental substance of water, Fahrenheit set about the practical matter of actually constructing a thermometer. This involved a lot of experimenta�tion, both in terms of materials and design, but he eventually settled on the same combination of mercury-in-a-glass-tube that we use today. That left the matter of calibration, and the scale he chose has been one of the primary whipping boys of metrication advocates. Instead of following the �logical� route and calling zero the freezing point of water and 100 the boiling point, he assigned the weird values of 32 and 212 degrees for these points. Illogical, right?
Maybe not. Consider, first, that this man was smart enough to come up with the principles of this instrument in the first place; it is vanishingly unlikely that he would skip past this detail without excellent reason. And he had excellent reason. He realized that, though water made for handy reference points, its behavior had little to do with how humans perceive temperature. In the northern hemisphere, where most of the world's population lives and lived, we experience a range of� temperature which is well below the freezing point of water at one end, and (fortunately) well below the boiling point of water at the other. Calibrating a thermometer relative to water makes about as much sense as calibrating a clock to the day on Mars �� it has no connection to us. So Fahrenheit measured what people actually experience, averaging extreme lows at 0, and extreme highs at 100, then left the scale open at either end. To this day, this range is useful for humans everywhere, on an intuitive level. We know that anything over 100 degrees is getting dangerously hot, and that anything under 0 is getting dangerously cold. We can relate to this scale.
It is also significant that Fahrenheit used a 0-to-100 scale at all. Remember, this was long pre-metrics, but people were accustomed, since antiquity, to make use of a �100� scale. Think centurions, for instance, or century, or percent. Hundreds are often th�e handiest way to measure and bracket significant ranges, and people make use of this, when it makes sense. Hundreds can easily be converted to higher or lower levels, so we have our money in decimal values, as well as very fine measurements, as in thousandths or parts-per-million. Fahrenheit recognized the value of hundreds; he just put them to work relative to human perceptions, rather than forcing humans to translate their perceptions relative to the characteristics of water. Unlike Mr. Celsius, who apparently missed all this. Mr. Fahrenheit made it a point to relate the fruits of his labors to human beings, and he did so using a decimal range for typical living conditions. This range was fine-grained enough to mark perceptible changes in temperature, but coarse-grained enough that it wasn't unwieldy. Mr. Celsius locked himself into a range that had nothing to do with people, and one consequence of this is that Celsius' �scale is much coarser than Fahrenheit's, almost twice as coarse. In practice, this means that if you take the easy road, and just jump in whole degrees when taking readings, you will miss significant changes. And if you don't, you'll be dealing, unnecessarily, with decimal points.
Some Celsius asides here: did you know that the original scale had 0 as the boiling point, and 100 as the freezing point? That the French National Assembly adopted it into the Metric system on April Fool's Day? And did you realize that the Celsius scale has no rational connection to the Metric system? Sure, part of it runs from 0 to 100, but so does Fahrenheit's.
Now the question must surely arise: why not count everything by hundreds? Why does so much of conventional measure veer off into dozens and sixteenths and scores? In answer, let me tell you about some French carpenters.
I was in Montreal years ago, having dinner with a couple of carpenters who were visitin�g from near Paris. They were describing a brilliant technique whereby they had vastly simplified layout for their jobs. �Instead of using 1 meter as a standard,� one of them said, �we use 1.2 meters. That way we hardly ever have to deal with decimal points, as 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, and itself.�
And I said, �You mean, like the foot?�
And I swear, they both slapped their foreheads and made various French exclamations of astonishment. And the most significant thing for me was that they knew that the foot has twelve inches in it. They had just never considered that there might be a logical reason for it. But 1.2 meters, well, that made sense.
