Being a Dominion of the British Empire, Canada took to using the Imperial measurement system.
This is what I grew up with, feet, inches, pounds, miles per hour, gallons (which are slightly different than the US Gal ) and etc.
In my everyday woodworking pursuits, I used strictly inches and foot. It use a base 12 system;
12 inches in a foot. This make it easy to express ratio or fractions such as 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and etc.
I like this fraction system because it help me visualized better object size and relation, both in my head and by looking at it. But it is deemed archaic and somewhat convoluted to the uninitiated.
Enter the Metric system, base 10, makes everything divisible or multiplied by 10 easy to switch unit of measurements. Simple and clean isn't it?
And being used more and more around the world, it make sense to standardized. There are all kinds of horror stories in the engineering world where small errors of conversion between both measurements systems from each side of the pond caused all kinds of Oups!!
Rockets blew up at launch, space craft missed their trajectory by... a lot, planes ran out of fuel.
Here in Canada, we have been standardizing to the Metric system kicking and screaming since the 70s.
Between political and public resistances, this is where we are today, after almost 50 years of metrification.
My kids generation, born in the seventies, grew up learning Metric, not the Imperial system.
It created some confusion when I was working with the kids in the shop. They could not understand my inches and me their centimeters. I long solved that problem by making sure to remove any measuring devices that had metric on it. It's 6 and three little bars Dad :-)
Today I drive in Km per hour, pay my gas about Cdn $1.00 a litter, read my temperature in Celcius but adjust my thermostats in Fahrenheit. My weight and height are in feet and pounds, kitchen is still staunchly Imperial also. We set the stove temperature in Fahrenheit , use measurements like quart, cup, spoon etc.
And in woodworking? NO metric please, NO way. QEII was my Commander In Chief for over 37 years, I am a staunch Imperialist's when it comes to measurements. Long live my foot :-)
If you look at Canadian woodworking magazines, you will find often, oh surprise, feet and inches versus metric.
So after almost 50 years later, we Canadian are still slowly being dragged to the dark side of Metric, kicking and screaming. You will have to wait for the passing of my generations before making more headways I'm afraid :-)
Bob, putting his "foot" down on this Metric non sense :-)
- "You will have to wait for the passing of my generations before making more headways I'm afraid."
ReplyDeleteI see the life expectancy has reached 80 years for men in Canada. Congratulations.
It is 79.6 here in Belgium.
Although this was based on statistics before the COVID-19.
As we know 50% of us are supposed to live older then the life expectancy.
- " I long solved that problem by making sure to remove any measuring devices that had metric on it."
Tss Tss. Abuse of dominant position and school education sabotage.
When one ask for a cup of coffee in Belgium, Italy, France or elsewhere, one will receive very different quantities. So when I saw recipe expressed in cup, table spoon and other such things I was upset until I discovered it was standardised in the US customary system. I am still upset because I have to use a conversion table.
ReplyDeleteHa ha Sylvain abuse of dominant position and education sabotage ;-) YES. Je suis d'un petit village qui resiste encore et toujours a l'envahisseur (Asterix et Obelix :-)
ReplyDeleteOh yes our cups and spoons have long been standardized. The problem with switching between measurements standards is that it is never accurate. You either round up or down.
Easier to stick to what you already have. As for some other form of measurements you adapt like for temperature, everything is quoted in Celcius, you get used to it but given a choice between celcius or Fahrenheit i always set my temperatures using F. Heresy, I know :-)
Bob, who shall be buried in an imperial sized container please :-)
Btw Sylvain, my dad passed in 2006 one month short of his 81 birthday. I have pretty well heritated his High BP problems but i was diagnosed early and treated longer so i fully expect to make it to 80. After that? Warranty expired all bets are off :-)
ReplyDeleteBob turning 64 in a few days
Hi Bob
ReplyDeleteinteresting post and I especially like the flow chart. It looks to me like you are still screaming and kicking about getting fully metric.
Yes Ralph, after 50 years or so, this is where we are today :-)
ReplyDeleteWe are truly a bilingual country, we speak and swear in two language, use two measuring system and some of our Imperial measures differs slightly from the US. Our French is a mixture of the old world and our new world environment. Our language has old obscure no longer used French words, a mixture of English and Native words etc. Our English differs from both US and England, in both pronunciation and spelling (Z is pronounced Zed not Zee, colour not color etc).
When I was a kid I could not understand my maternal grandparents, they were living in the past in a rural region of the Beauce (Maple syrup country) my mom had to translate, they were still using old long ago disused French words (from our ancestors) Similarly Acadian French also makes uses of long forgotten words. Thrown in a mixture of French and English accents, mix it all up and you have a uniquely Canadian conversation, heh? :-)
And lastly, a lot of our official manuals in our military are strangely translated using official French, not what we use daily. As a results most of us Franco read the English side first. The only real advantage is when you have examinations in both language, you get two way to interpret the question :-)
Some of the French words we simply dont use being way too long, such as a "flap" on the wings of an airplane. Volet hypersustentateur is the correct French translation. Guess which one we used all day :-)
Bob, qui n'as pas de tabarnac de ruler metric inside sa shop a bois
Great article and an entertaining read , but respectfully Metric is so much simpler for the woodworker . I have switched all my measuring tools to metric and life is just easier. Merry Christmas
ReplyDeleteThanks unknown but, nah, i'll pass :-)
ReplyDeleteJokes asides if you switched everything over, yes it would be easier. Both going to metric or Imperial. Even easier than to rely on actual measurements and their sources of error is to use story stick, measuring blocks, patterns etc. or simply fitting part A into part B
Bob, die hard Imperialist :-)
Yes, great post. The grocery store is another place we get a strange mix of units. I think the stores like to advertise in "$/lb" vs. "$/kg" as it makes things seem less expensive. And since this is a WW blog, what is the metric equivalent of "board feet"? Jim B
ReplyDeleteYes Matt the 70s saw a push from North America to standardize with the rest of the world. It is terribly expensive to blue print a design from say Metric to Imperial in order to build it here, and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteBoth the B-57 Camberra and the AV8 Marines Harrier are examples, both British design, retooled to US Standard. We buy British submarines and tear out their fire control system and Canadianized it to be able to fire our American supplied torpedoes. Of course every time you try to convert from one system to another things get smaller or bigger, never quite the same. In the kitchen no big deal, in complex systems it opens all kinds of cans of worms. Ran into a few in my days :-)
Bob, who appreciate the simplicity of a base 10 system, but prefer my relative fractions to visualize my world
Oh yes Jim, the grocery stores are another whole ball of wax, our milk bags shrunk when they went metric, had to buy new sized holders and etc. To me the most annoying part is they are forever repackaging and shrinking to mask price increases. The other extreme, yo go to COTSCO and buy in industrial quantities. Makes it harder to compare.
ReplyDeleteEquivalent of Board foot, Hum never gave it that much thought. I would like to hear that one too :-)
Bo, learning new things every day :-)
Very scientific the European I says :) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk
ReplyDeleteHahah perfect, it explains it well. see nothing to it, its all very scientific :-)
DeleteBob, who learn a few new terms watching it :-)
I grew up in France so used to think in mm, cm and meter, as well as kg, gr and liters, dc, and cl.
ReplyDeleteThis was the most difficult thing to adapt with when I moved to Canada. When I read a measure in cm I have a picture of it, in inches this is more difficult even if I get used to it in my mind.
However for me it has always been easier to measure in mm as a base 10 is easier to deal with (in term of calculation) than a based 12. But up here everything is in inches so it is hard to measure your mortise when your chisel is in inches.
Worst thing is in the kitchen. When I see flour measure in cup this is a non sense for me. Flour is not a liquid so should be measured in mass not volume. Same with butter and so on. No chef would measure anything in volume for pastry except for fluids. (Yes I know a powdering material can be considered as a fluid but you get the idea).
So with time I got to measure things in inches even if the calculation of 15/16 minus half of 3/4 makes my head hurts, but never will I be able to measure things in cups while cooking. Oh and what about OZ, that exists in weight as well as volume!
- Excellent video. And length measurement is only the easy part.
ReplyDelete- U.S. citizen tends (pretend?) to ignore that the metric system is legal in U.S.A. since 1866. And in fact the metric system is the reference system in U.S.A. while the "U.S. customary system" is legally defined by conversion factors from the metric system. Customary is another word for secondary. There is an act which defines the metric system as the "prefered" system for trade and commerce. The U.S. politician are just not brave enough to suppress the customary system.
- U.S. NIST has been a major player in the refinements of the "Système International" as it is officially named.
visit https://www.nist.gov/timeline#event-774241
You hit the nail on the head Sylvain. Similar story here, been adopted in the 1800 as well, but we still use the Imperial system a lot. But my guess would be the US and Canada are doing it for different reasons. Officially we are metric so most official publications are in SI, Government agencies and etc. Doctor visits are in SI, our food is all SI and etc. The biggest hold ups are inside our workshops like mine :-) Where it does not matter if you use SI or Imperial or cubits or whatever. Our woodworking publications are therefore mostly Imperial, a nod to our Southern neighbors, the American. We wont be selling much magazines if not in inches...
ReplyDeleteIn our military you will find a mixture of both metric and imperial depending on the weapons system origins. For reasons explained above in blog, you don't want to start converting for maintenance and repairs. We stick to either as are the specialized tools involved.
Perhaps unlike the Americans, we are simply doing it to fit what we have, as they are (guessing) against SI for more political reasons. Freedom fries and all.
Bob, who has no plan to switch over, it works for me
What I'm trying to say is that, beyond my rhetoric about being a staunch Imperialist, putting my "foot" down and what have you, the real reason we are hanging up to it is because of our geography. Our biggest trading partner (by a lot), the US, next door, is not going Metric anytime soon, it would be suicidal for us to ignore that.
ReplyDeleteSo we are using both system interchangeably in our day to day life. Switching without given it much thoughts. I read my temperature forecast in Celsius, but set my thermostats in Fahrenheit and etc.
Our reasons has nothing to do with efficiency or which system is better it is simply convenience. It is really not that confusing, we do it al the time, similar with switching back and forth from English to French in a conversation.
Bob, who speak fluently English, French, Imperial, Metric and etc :-)
As I remember it was industry resisting because of the cost of retooling. It was probably the idea of forced retooling that was problematic.
ReplyDeleteAt this point I would say that industry has lead the way in quietly converting to metric. Our largest industry, automotive, is metric as far as fasteners are concerned. Any computer controlled equipment can be directly controlled in metric.
The last frontiers of conversion will be raw materials and peoples minds. Observing people's ability to imagine conspiracy at every turn suggests that metric isn't around the corner in the US.
I don't want to replace all my handplanes to have 19mm boards instead of 3/4. Oh, and the chisels too!
ReplyDeleteFor engineering calculations involving dynamics the metric system is definitely superior. The english system for mass is counterintuitive and conflates mass and force. I don't even bother looking up the conventions for lbm and lbf anymore. I'll convert a force or mass back to english at the end of the calculation.
ReplyDeleteEven metric has issues with this. If a structure has a load capacity of 100 Newtons and you want to support 60 Kilograms, will it fail? The english system makes the interpretation more direct by making the calculations obtuse. Really, the two systems complement each other for calculation and communication.
HI Steve
ReplyDeleteInteresting perspective, never realized that, but then again my engineering knowledge is mostly from a maintainer point of view. Which a few times, got me wondering: What sizes hands did this engineers figured out would be able to squeeze in there?? :-)
As for our tools, with increased globalization, when buying chisels even if labelled metric or imperial, they are often an approximation of one or the other depending on provenance. Then we have all those wonderful antique tools hand made with all kinds of tolerance, close was close enough. Bottom line, I never set my measuring tools to abstract numbers but to the size of the tool I plan on using. That way, could not careless if its a metric tool disguised as Imperial or a handforged tool to approximate dimensions. If it fit, I sit. Oups, no that was the cat saying that :-)
Bob
- I also make my mortise with the chisel available except, may be, if I had to make a very wide mortise( see: https://hyvelbenk.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/hovelbenken-i-mariestad-er-pa-fotene/ it is in a Nordic language but pictures are self explanatory)
ReplyDelete- Most of us are mostly confronted to weight only with our feet on the ground but, for example, if you make a steep turn in an aircraft, although you mass didn't change, your weight has seriously increased.
I remember my cheeks being pulled downward (in the direction of the seat in fact).
Congrats Sylvain You encountered G forces. When fighter pilots eject from their aircraft, their spines actually compress and they get slightly smaller. I had a co worker who was a ex CF104 Starfighter pilot and he was short, so I teased him that he must have ejected a lot :-) He didn't. And because of the ejection system we have minimum and maximum height and weight restrictions for the pilots.
ReplyDeleteMoral of this story, it is always better to land with your plane :-)
Also a lot easier for us maintainers to fix also that way.
Bob, who always landed with his pilots...so far
Bob
- The value of g depends of various factors: altitude, earth crust composition, latitude, positions of the moon and the sun, etc. Very sensitive gravimeters can detect the soil soaking after rain. The local value of g varies (slightly) during the day.
ReplyDelete- Mechanical balances compare masses and should not be affected by g variations. Spring balances and electronic balances measure a force, not a mass and they calibration is only good for a given g value.
- When buying a steak, we are interested by the nutritive value of it and not by how much it will pull down on our stomach. So it is normal to buy it by the mass (kg) and not by the weight (N). Living on the moon, we would like to have the same mass of steak even if its weight would be divided by about 6.
So the difference between kg and Newton is essential.
The confusion between mass and weight comes by the fact that we use a "weighing" procedure to establish the mass of something. One could imagine other procedures but it would be much more costly and extremely difficult for great objects (like an aircraft {for which we still would have to determine the center of gravity}).
Bob,
ReplyDeleteToo funny and great comments. I went cold turkey metric in my shop several years ago and it was for the best. Mistakes are fewer and measuring is easier. As mentioned, tools are a mix.
We have what I believe is the only U.S. metric marked Interstate, I-19, here in AZ. I-19 runs from Tucson to Nogales, perfect for getting you ready to cross the border into Mexico. Of course while distance is metric speed is Imperial, go figure.
ken
Thanks for explaining all this Bob. As an American I could only do a 500 milliassed job of it.
ReplyDelete