Imperial-isms

It never fails to raise a smile on my face when I consider the contradictions that we both enjoy and endure; as a nation, we love to make things difficult for ourselves. An example:

We fill our cars up with petrol priced in litres, only to quote miles per gallon figures. Then, we fill our tyres up with pounds per square inch (tyres which have their width in mm and their diameter in inches) and set off in our heavy cars (measured in kg) to our destinations (measured in miles) guided by signs in yards and miles. We drink our beer in pints, our wine from metric bottles, our spirits in imperial gills and our soft drink from litre bottles. We know our height in feet and inches and our weight in pounds, and yet we are all uber-conscious about the grams of fat in our food. When born, our children will draw blank looks if their weight is quoted in kg or grams, but we all smile and nod sagely when parents proudly announce the length of their offspring. In mm. The grander among us measure our gardens in acres – and measure our lawn feed from a metric bag. Our houses are measured in square feet and yet they are built with metric bricks, imperial doors, metric pipe work and imperial timber. We know our nails and screws are metric, because it says it on the boxes, but we still feel more comfortable referring to them in inches.

Our temperatures are in Celsius, our rainfall in inches, our wind speed in mph and our snowfall in cm. When it gets cold, we press a metric-width switch to send a metric unit of electricity to turn on our imperial boilers, and send heated water (measured in metric) down metric pipes to radiators rated in imperial – all so we can keep comfortably warm, metrically. The angle of our hills is measured in degrees (imperial) but rolling down them causes us to speed up due to gravity (which we know in metric). We burn calories, not Joules, understand horsepower, not Watts, pound-feet not Newton-metres.

So we’re an imperial nation? Err, not quite. Be honest; do you know how hot it is in Fahrenheit, the capacity of your car engine in cubic inches, how many grams there are in an ounce or the difference between a ton and a tonne? Thought not. We’re a hybrid nation, a bastard cross of convenience and empirical stubbornness. We hate change, but we hate having to think even more. Take the time of 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation corresponding to the transition between the 2 hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Caesium 133 atom at 0 K to think about that. Or a second, whichever is longer.