From the Editor L .

For the last two or three issues we have concerned ourself with other matters in this column, and some of you have sur­mised that we had forgotten about the metric system. Ah, but you are in error, we were merely waiting for the armorer to remove some dents from our helmet and to finish resharpening Excalibur. He also welded a new link on our belt which seems to have shrunk a little. We wish he would not insist on spacing the links 2.54 cm apart, but there is not much hope for educating armorers.

Various readers have sent us metric clippings from recent maga­zines. Most of these are decidedly prometric, and one of the chief annoyances of the anti articles is that the prometrics are trying to bandwagon or steamroller the system through by im­plying the inevitability of an eventual change. Many readers informed us tha t a nationally syndicated columnist, Sylvia Por­ter, devoted three columns 23-25 December 1963 to a discussion of the advantages of the metric system. We had already read this in our own hometown newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, which gave it a prominent display. In one column she mentions that all milk bottles and gasoline tanks would have to be changed. I t seems to us that these two changes would be so minor that hardly any of us need even notice. Few farmers pour milk into bottles these days; this is done by a filling machine at a dairy, and generally into a waxed cardboard carton. I t makes very little difference to such a machine whether it is adjusted to stop a t 1.000 quart or 1.057 quarts. People who used to order two quarts would still order two liters, and the automatic increase of 6% in home milk consumption would more than offset changeover costs. A similar argument applies to gasoline. Most people say "Fill it up" , and the pump computes the cost.

In its July 1962 issue Mechanical Engineering presented a four-part debate titled: "The Metric System: Should we convert?" The four viewpoints considered were: "All out—now", "Let Industry Decide", "Decimalize the Inch", and "The Transition". The writer on transition pointed out that "the solutions pro­posed have been uncompromisingly drastic, with little under­standing of the temperament of our people and their reverence for their unit heritage". We are not sure what is meant by our "unit heritage". We think immediately of a penny postal, which now costs 4 ¢. Perhaps he means the nautical mile, which no two books in our library define in quite the same way.

In the November 1963 issue of Mechanical Engineering there is an article by M. Mateos on "Merging with the Metric Sys­tem". He proposes a way to make the change without losing our cultural heritage of common words. First, change the quart to a liter, but call it a "metric quart" . Then we could still have a gallon of 4 liters and a 55-gallon barrel. Next he would redefine the pound so that 2 metric pounds equaled 1 kg. Finally, he would redefine the inch to be exactly 2.5 cm, instead of 2.54. Thus, in his system, he points out tha t we would have adopted the metric system but could still have people 6 feet tall and weighing 180 pounds. This would indeed be a rose by a different name. He points out that "a complete material change would be impossible. For instance, in land division tracts a mile square are here to stay". The residents of Detroit can sleep tonight, knowing that Eight Mile Road need not be relocated. And the Michigan border can remain 3 miles north of Toledo.

In the December 1963 issue of Mechanical Engineering there is a letter to the editor opposing the metric system. This writer considers the cost of conversion and concludes that "i t would be cheaper for us to pay the way for Europe to change over to inches, since we find many other reasons to grant them money out of our

taxes". This sort of argument is similar to that in an antimetric article which appeared in Popular Mechanics, December 1960. This author concludes: "Today, the metric system is doing an excellent job in this country's laboratories—let's keep it there!" In Science of 29 November 1963 one man wrote in that now that we have adopted the wavelength of a line in the spectrum of Kr86 as the basis for the international standard of length the meter is no longer "basic". Replying to this in the same issue, another writer states: "The fact that the wavelength of a line in the spectrum of Kr86 is a more precisely measured unit of length than is a metric or inch unit does not destroy the usefulness of the metric unit. I t is the ease of changing orders of magnitude from microns to kilometers that concerns the majority of scientists in their daily work. One does not expect industry and commerce to convert to the metric system unless they themselves choose to do so in their long-term interest, but since scientists depend in large par t on scientific and technical discoveries for their advances, surely they are entitled to the system with which they prefer to work. What scientists prefer may be ascertained by anyone who picks up and looks into a few scientific journals in any library in any part of the world".

This last point interests us, as we constantly hear the argument that "the metric system is fine in scientific journals, where it is universally used, but the general public is not ready for i t" . Then when we use this same argument to persuade an author to change to metric he balks. About two years ago, a t a meeting of all the editors of journals of the American Institute of Physics and of the journals of the related Societies, we mentioned our efforts to keep our journal metric. There was a hushed silence as the other august editors looked like haughty Boston dowagers and murmured tha t this might be a problem for a semipopular journal but surely not for the rest of them, as they have been metric all along. We withdrew, abashed and crestfallen—another dent in the helmet. However, we have now examined quite a few copies of quite a few of these more respectable journals and we have discovered tha t there is scarcely an article tha t does not contain hybrid mixtures of metric and English units. These other editors have been much more laissez-faire than we have been. We are happy to note that the subject came up again a t another recent meeting of the same group of editors and at least two other editors now felt they should require all papers to be metric. We suspect that the tide is turning even here. We have felt all along tha t to convert an entire populace to this system might be too much to expect, but if one can persuade only a handful of editors and publishers the battle is won, a t least scien­tifically.

J. N. HOWARD

506 APPLIED OPTICS / Vol. 3, No. 4 / April 1964