How France created the metric system
bbc.com
bbc.com
However, apart from that, the failing of the metric system is the actual measurements they used (length of a meter, celsius, etc), which are not really a great fit for humans.
Sure, its clever that 0C is water freezing and 100C is water boiling, but most humans live only in a fraction of that range. So it forces all sorts of inelegant practical situations (notice how nearly every euro thermostat has decimals so you can set it to 17.5).
Fundamentally, the metric system is to measurement what "Brutalism" was to architecture. It places the system above the human and expects us to adapt to it.
Somehow, in France, "Pinte" is still used for beer, "livre" (pound) was still used recently in cook books for butter, and we still use some weird non-metrics mesurment like "corde" for raw wood.
> pinte 1 ~952.1 ml ~2.01 pint ~1.68 pint Although etymologically related to the English unit pint, the French pint is about twice as large. It was the main small unit in common use, and measured 1/36 of a cubic French foot.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France...
I'm French and I've heard of almost none of the units in those tables actually
> In Canada, the Weights and Measures Act (R.S. 1985), which has the laws in English and French printed side-by-side, defines a pint in English as 1/8 of a gallon, but defines a pinte in French as 1/4 of a gallon.[10] Thus, if you speak English and order "a pint of beer", servers are legally required to serve you 568 ml of beer,[11] but if you speak French and order "une pinte de bière", they are legally required to serve an Imperial quart (une pinte), which is 1136 ml—twice as much.[12] To order an Imperial pint when speaking French in Canada, one must instead order une chopine de bière.
The NHS and Wikipedia seem to disagree with you:
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-support/calculating-alc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pint#Imperial_pint
Google's conversion in search results states it is a half liter for some reason. Maybe it assumes "imperial pint" means "metric pint"?
Weight is definitely more of a mix though.
(Bottled beer is almost always 500ml. Newcastle Brown Ale is one of the few exceptions.)
Honestly how often do you really divide any measurement by 10? Perhaps km.
We're talking about customary human usage. Various fields use their own units from nm to parsecs and whether they should be divisible by 10 is not part of my discussion (sure, for both of these cases it's as good as any other divisor). In fact for daily use, many metric countries retain traditional units not just for daily purposes but even for things like land. The UK is the most familiar case for Americans, but many countries are similar.
The rest, IMO, are arguments that get repeated every time this issue comes up that have barely any value. For temperature, the main argument is that people won’t understand what ½ means. Counter-argument (also weak, but not weaker than the one about ½) is that digital body-for measuring body temperatures that use Fahrenheit all seem to use a digit beyond the decimal, too (https://www.google.nl/search?q=Digital+fahrenheit+thermomete... shows 98.6 as the winning value). The argument that negative temperature are hard to understand, in turn, is offset by the fact that Fahrenheit also way to easily requires the use of 3 digit numbers for normal temperatures (both also very weak arguments)
The ‘exact division is easier’ argument holds some water, but how often do you need to do exact divisions (no, you can’t use a saw to cut a two by four into two two by twos; the saw takes away material). One could also argue we should have chosen an odd prime to give almost all divisors even footing, and to prevent requiring the invention of ‘round to odd/even’ conventions.
Also one meter is about the length of one very large step, or two smaller steps, and one gr the weight of about a teaspoon of water, or 1kg a large loaf of bread.
They are human scale.
Heck, if we all grew up using kelvin we would have no pratical problems with it.
Not exactly sure what you mean. Celsius is pretty convenient in ranges I care about.
* -20 to +40 are outside temperatures here
* 100 is Sauna temperature
* ~100 is boiling temperature
* 180-300 are baking/grilling temperatures
The absolute error might be a few degrees, which will get you close enough to not be completely miserable. The relative error is about a degree. Going from 61 to 62 might actually be going from 63 to 64 (still a step of 1 degree), but it won't be going from 60 to 63.
The good scale is Rankine. It is about the finest stepping that will give you both 0 being absolute and hot oven temperatures that fit in 3 digits. Degree size is the same as Fahrenheit.
Let's talk about mass. For small quantities you can use grams all right, though one gramm is still to small to be useful unless you're dealing.
But you surely need kilogram (pronounced kilò in Russian), and for bulk shipping you need megagram (nobody ever uses this word, but you have ton fortunately).
Again, meters are useful for heights and sizes, but useless for distance. Here you need kilometer. No shorter word for that, buddy. And for large distance you need thousands of kilometers. Nobody ever uses megameter, again.
You can have single 10-based system but you still need different words for quantities differing by three or four orders.
I'm a native German, living in Germany, and I've never heard of "dag".
How so? It was adopted by every country in the world except for 3.
Adoption is hardly a measure of success, given that the adoption is only widespread because of imperial colonization by a couple of nations which happened to use it.
You can usually say that any given measurement system has intrinsic properties to recommend it, but I think any such discussion usually devolves into the same sort of nonsense as whether any two very different natural languages are inherently better than one another.
Is English a better natural language than Chinese, or the other way around? I bet if you polled their native speakers on that, even you selected ones who were close to bilingual in the two, they'd usually like their native language better.
It's very hard for people to step outside of themselves and recognize their cognitive biases. But it does tell you something that people who grew up with the imperial system are more likely to argue for its advantages, and the same for people who grew up with metric. It's not like it's genetic.
> [...]notice how nearly every euro thermostat has decimals so you can set it to 17.5[...]
This is an interesting point I hadn't heard before, but for the sake of consistency, do you think the US dollar is also an inherently inelegant currency because it has fractional values, as opposed to some other currencies that don't? Does the very existence of cents on the dollar annoy you as you go about your business?
If you hold that view and you grew up with the imperial system and think 17.5 Celsius makes no sense, I congratulate you on your consistency.
But I'm willing to bet that this isn't even a thing you'd noticed or thought of, which is indicative of the cognitive bias of just trying to find reasons for disliking what you're unfamiliar with, even when those reasons can be perfectly transposed on other things with which you are familiar.
Side note: By "unfamiliar" I'm not claiming that say a European who dislikes the imperial system doesn't understand it, or the other way around. But as with natural languages measurement systems are something where it's hard to truly become "bilingual" as an adult.
You can argue (and I think you'd be right) that say metric is simpler, but is it better by some objective metric in the minds of its users than imperial? Who knows. I could also try to argue with a native Chinese speaker that their writing system is overly complex, and I'm sure I'd get millions of them that would think I was crazy.
If you do any kind of carpentry, the fact that a foot is 12 inches, which can be divided into halves, thirds and quarters really nicely makes it a nicer system to work with when you're just doing stuff ad-hoc without plans. I wouldn't want to do physics math in the imperial system, though.
Really? If that's an example of 'failing', I'd like to see what success looks like.
I think I saw this argument first time in one of Taleb's books, and I have to say I have difficulties understanding that. What makes yard a better fit for humans than a meter? Or what makes a pound better fit than a kilogram?
(Agreeably, it is stupid that the base SI unit for mass has kilo in it. And instead of 10 base it might be nicer to have base 8. But imperial system does not address these)
Anyway, my proposal for compromise is that imperial countries adopt SI and metric countries adopt decimal point and get rid of decimal comma.