 If you gave a diploma to a tube, would it be a graduated cylinder? Bienvenue à Paris! Get your pitchforks and torches ready. I'm about to make an internet video defending imperial units in France. This is going to be good. First, a little background. Imperial units are called out because they were the official units of measure of the British Empire. They were standardized along with language to facilitate trade between all the myriad countries colonized by Great Britain. Units like feet and inches had existed for millennia before them, but if you saw the number of countries that Great Britain tried to colonize, you could see what a problem a small difference in units might be. I mean, anyone who's taken a high school science class knows that unit conversion isn't hard, but it does take time and it can screw you up if you're not paying close attention, even if you're really smart. I'm looking at you, NASA. So, to make things easier trading between the countries, the Brits made a bar of metal which they called a standard yard and said that dividing it into 3s got you standard feet, dividing the feet into 12s got you standard inches and so on. So the British Empire was unified in their units, which was fantastic for them, but other countries had other units of measurement that they used, which caused all sorts of problems for people, including the French Revolution. French aristocrats and merchants would frequently use dodgy unit conversion to their advantage because, hey, if you buy and land by the short mile and then sell it by the long mile and some local farmers get screwed out of their land, stay la vie, at least until those farmers get pitforks and torches. During the uproar of the French Revolution, it was decided that there should be a new standard system of units, the people's standard, the metric system. They made their own bar of metal that they thought was 110 millionth of the distance from the north pole to the equator on a line that traversed Paris and said that that was one meter, one tenth of that was one decimeter, one tenth of that was one centimeter, one tenth of that was one millimeter and so on. The metric system has been adopted by almost every industrialized country since then, including Great Britain, which officially transitioned in 1995. But one of those distant colonies the British founded still persists to this day to use imperial units, despite the fact that they were belled against Great Britain in 1776 before those units were made standard. They call themselves the United States of America. You're probably familiar with the sentiment that metric units are superior to imperial units in every single way and the United States is so dumb for hanging on to them and blah, blah, blah. I'm an American mechanical engineer and yes, I would love for there to be just one standard, but I don't think imperial deserves the bad rap that has gotten. First, if someone needs to repair or modify an existing part, it's nice if they can just grab a tape measure and know how big of a sheet of material they need or how far apart the fasteners are and so on. Imperial units actually make this slightly easier simply because the smallest unit, the inch, is actually bigger than either the smallest units of the metric system, the centimeter or the millimeter. So it's easier to tell what a given dimension is supposed to be. You can just grab a ruler and know that it's supposed to be 11 inches instead of squinting at it and trying to decide if it's 27 centimeters or 28 centimeters or 275 millimeters. Imperial units are also very easily divisible into halves, thirds, quarters, eighths, many useful fractions. Metric units are only really divisible into fives and twos and although decimals can be clean, the ability to break something in half repeatedly is really useful if you want to divide something up equally. If those sort of nice round numbers aren't possible, then there's no real advantage to either system. If something has to be 23.374, then make it 23.374. One of the metric system's major claims to fame is the ability to convert between very large and very small numbers quickly and easily by taking away or adding zeros. And while this is useful for many kinds of science, it doesn't really come up a lot in everyday life and in industry it's practically useless. I mean, how often do you measure something in millimeters and then need to know how many kilometers that is? It's useful for making high school physics problems but not much else. Finally, metric is supposed to be based on universally accessible objects like the earth or the weight of water, but it's not. When the French Revolutionaries were setting up the metric system, they made some errors in measurement in the things that they wanted to use as standards. Like the meter is supposed to be one ten millionth of the distance from the north pole to the equator, but it's actually one ten million one thousand nine hundred and sixty fifth. How's that for a nice round number? So, just like Imperial, the metric system is based on physical objects that are locked away in a vault somewhere that bear an approximate relationship to real things. The General Conference of Weights and Measures finally did attach a real-world number to the meter. It's the distance traveled by light in one two hundred and ninety nine million seven hundred and ninety eight thousand four hundred and fifty eighth of a second. It seems a little hypocritical to complain about the fact that there are five thousand two hundred and eighty feet in a mile when that's the standard that you want to move to. I mean, yeah, there have historically been more than seventy different definitions for a foot, but it's always been about that big. When you get down to it, yes, it would be better for everybody if there was just one standard for units of measurement. And yes, it would be easier for the United States to switch than the rest of the industrialized world, but Imperial units are still useful and they do many things better than the metric system does. Until the day we do switch, don't flip out when you see somebody using feet and pounds. Just listen to some for climbers. It'll be all right. Is there a reason to use metric that I forgot? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Merci de votre utilité. N'oubliez pas de voler, subscribe, or share, and I'll see you next week.