The Adoption of the Metric System

Abstract

THE controversy with reference to the metric system appears to have passed through two stages and to be approaching the climax of its third, and possibly final, stage. In the first stage the glamour of its uniformly applied denary scale, and of its carefully related standards of length, area, volume, and weight, carried the general public in an apparently wholehearted advocacy which was clearly reflected in the early divisions on the Metric Bill in Parliament. Advocates of the binary scale might attend metric meetings and tear up sheets of paper into two, four, and eight parts; theorists with the duo-denary scale might drag a red-herring across the trail; workers with the most convenient of the English weights and measures might voice their fears of a bad exchange in units of measurement; but the metric advocates carried the day, in most cases with a wonderful accompaniment of popular, if not business, enthusiasm.