PIRATING MEASUREMENTS
How the Jolly Roger Hijacked the Metric System
Throughout most of the world, people use the metric system (meters, liters, grams) as their units of measure. However, a few nations, most notably the United States, don’t use the metric system in everyday life. Instead, they employ what is known as the “imperial system,” which uses units such as miles, pounds, and gallons. When it comes to cars, for example, the speedometer shows American drivers how fast they are going in “miles per hour,” and the road signs use the same units to tell them if that’s too fast. Scales use “pounds,” gasoline is sold by the “gallon,” and so on.
So why exactly does the US use a different system? Blame pirates. In the country’s early days (the late 1700s), it was a hodgepodge of different states and cultures all under one federal government. And when it came to interstate commerce, these regional peculiarities made things difficult—specifically, the differences in weights and measures. The official “pound” used in New York, for example, may have weighed a different amount than the one used in, say, Virginia, and neither was in a position to force the other to adjust its standards. In January 1790, in his first-ever State of the Union address, President George Washington made specific note of this problem, stating that “uniformity in the currency, weights, and measures of the United States is an object of great importance, and will, I am persuaded, be duly attended to.” That wasn’t an idle wish, either; his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, got to work on a solution.
Among the various options that Jefferson proposed was a base-ten system, which would break everything down into divisions and multiples of ten. For example, an inch would be one tenth of one foot and one mile would be 10,000 feet. This idea had the support of George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, but Congress was slow to act, failing to adopt it by the time 1790 had ended. Jefferson, however, did not give up.
France was also working on a decimal system of its own at this time—the one now known as the metric system. Jefferson wrote to his French contacts to inquire about this new “metric” system, hoping that unified weights and measures could not only benefit interstate trade but also international trade. To move this process along, France dispatched a scientist named Joseph Dombey to the United States in 1793. With him was a small metallic cylinder with what looked like a handle on top. This cylinder was the official “kilogram,” and weighed one kilogram. This was the weight by which other weights were measured: The basis for measuring mass using the metric system.
It should have been simple: Dombey would give the kilogram to Jefferson; Jefferson would propose the metric system to Congress; Congress would most likely endorse the system; and the US would still use this system today. But that didn’t happen—because the kilogram never got to Jefferson. Ocean winds blew Dombey’s ship off course; instead of landing safely near Washington, DC, it sailed into the Caribbean Sea. There, British privateers—basically pirates, but with permission of the Crown to raid non-British ships with impunity—boarded and looted Dombey’s vessel. They imprisoned Dombey, who (per The Washington Post) lived out the rest of his life under lock and key, and they auctioned off whatever seemed valuable from his ship. This included the official kilogram, which ultimately ended up in what is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology. France did dispatch another scientist with another official kilogram that arrived safely, but by then Jefferson was no longer secretary of state and his successor showed little interest in systems of weight and measures.