Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 5, 1990                   TAG: 9003052253
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

INCH BY INCH/ THE METRIC SYSTEM IS COMING

The argument is the same, that America is an island in a metric sea and will lose trade if it doesn't convert. But the case is much stronger this time.

In 1975, when Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act, the grass-roots reaction ranged from apathy to alarm. The apathetic couldn't see the need to change from the familiar to the strange. The alarmed felt as if they were losing their bearings. And those who were agitating for metric were overly logical.

"They didn't realize," says G.T. Underwood, director of the U.S. Department of Commerce Office of Metric Programs, "that elderly people, getting up in the morning and hearing the weather on the radio, wouldn't know how to dress if the temperature was given in metric. People who drove into a gas station and bought their gas by the liter didn't know . . . if they were being cheated."

On the other side were individuals such as Seaver W. Leslie, head of Americans for Customary Weight and Measure. "It was a housewives' rebellion. Good old Yankee common sense beat down the effort of these people trying to make a buck from simply changing over from one measurement system to another."

So that effort bogged down. But the rest of the industrial world - including formerly pound-inch societies such as Canada and England - united behind the metric standard. Now the United States can really be left behind. In 1992 the European Economic Community is to unify economically; and Underwood sees "every indication" that those countries - with nearly half the global manufacturing trade - will resist importing non-metric goods. Nuts and bolts measured in fractions of an inch can't be used to replace those in metric. Even some crude materials, such as lumber, are "measurement sensitive."

Our prevalent system is comfortable for most of us Americans. It's based on commonplace concepts: A yard is about the length of an arm, a foot about as long as its human namesake, an inch about a thumb's width. A mile, originally, was 1,000 steps, as paced by Roman soldiers. An acre was the amount of land that could be plowed with a yoke of oxen in a day. All those are things we can visualize.

The same system can also be maddeningly arbitrary. Shoe sizes are based, believe it or not, on barleycorn lengths. An ounce, once the equivalent of an inch or one-twelfth of a pound, now is one-eighth of a cup. Then there are avoirdupois ounces and troy ounces. Most Americans who venture beyond everyday landmarks are soon lost in the non-metric jungle.

We are farther along than we may think in the journey toward metric. Joggers run 5K and 10K races; at home they keep their financial records on computers with, say, 512K storage capacity. We buy 2-liter bottles of soft drinks, rolls of 35mm film, 60-watt bulbs. Our automobiles are metric. So is our dollar, which has 100 units.

If George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had had their way, we'd have gone metric more than 200 years ago. We can't put it off much longer. Since 1975, America has lost its dominant position in world trade. We can't afford to forfeit more export sales by clinging to the past.