Alaska's Metric Connection

The United States was officially made a metric country by Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, whose name flows ever onward past Juneau's mountains in the form of glacier ice. In his position as Superintendent of Weights and Measures, he issued the "Mendenhall order" in 1893 which set the United States' standards of length and mass as the meter and the kilogram.

Though the United States has officially been on the metric system for nearly a century, most of us still think in ounces, pounds, quarts, inches, and miles. We are not alone: at least one other country on the planet is still not metric. That country is Sierra Leone, an enclave of about 2.5 million people situated on the west coast of Africa. Several other small African countries may still be on the English system. But even England gave up the English system of units in recent years because of economic necessity.

With its current highly negative balance of payments, the United States may have to go the same route. The country's non-standard automotive and machinery exports are bound to meet increasing customer resistance in an all-metric world.

Had George Washington realized how long it would take for his country to go metric, he would have been horrified. Along with his country, he tried to father adoption of a decimal system of measurement. His first annual message to Congress pleaded for establishment of uniformity in standards, currency, and weight and measures. Successive pleas went to Congress in Washington's second and third annual messages. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams also tried to get Congress to act. Finally the Fifth Congress, in 1799, passed the first act establishing a procedure for standardizing weights and measures.

Nearly a hundred years was to pass before the United States legally went metric. In the meantime, France was struggling with the usage of metric and a host of ancient units of wondrous sort. That ended in 1837 when a law was passed forbidding the use of other than metric units.

Meanwhile in the United States, complexity abounded. While Congress wallowed in the problem, the separate States, independently of each other, adopted their own standards. Several fluid measures were in use, including the ale gallon of 282 cubic inches and the Queen Anne, or wine gallon, of 231 cubic inches; England abolished these in 1824 when the imperial gallon was defined to contain 10 pounds of water. The Queen Anne gallon survived in part of North America and is now called the U.S. gallon.