Transcriber: Mirjana Čutura Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Many people think,
especially English-speaking people think that the metric system is foreign.
This is not so.
The metric system was invented in England.
To be specific, it was invented by John Wilkins,
and the metric system he invented
covered the main measuring ideas at that time.
Basically,
he wanted to measure how long things took,
so he developed the idea of a pendulum
that would swing exactly backwards and forwards
in one second.
He, then, carefully measured how long that piece of string had to be,
and once he'd established that,
he had what he called a "universal measure."
And that universal measure is what has come down to us as a meter.
He used that meter to measure time, obviously,
but also to measure things like area,
where he got a square that was a meter long, a meter wide,
and he could measure floor areas, wall areas, or whatever.
If he wanted to measure a cubic measure,
he simply took a meter by a meter,
by a meter high, and a meter wide, etc.,
and by doing that, he was able to measure volume.
Measuring mass was a little harder,
and, basically, he did it this way.
He took a tenth of a meter -
now, for convenience,
I'll use my fist, which turns out to be a 100 millimeters wide,
is a tenth of a meter.
Conceptually, then he devised a container that looked something like this.
This was a container that was a tenth of a meter wide,
a tenth of a meter long,
and a tenth of a meter high.
Bishop Wilkins' concept was that if you fill this with water
right to the very top -
and he was quite specific about the water;
it had to be water that was distilled rain water.
He then took the contents of that water
to have a mass of what we call one kilogram.
And so he had devised a system where with one single measurement,
he could measure all of the things that he knew about.
He published this; he wrote it out in five pages of a major book
that he had been commissioned to write.
Here's a copy of the book here, and this book is 600 pages long.
The five pages about the universal measure
are on page 190,
and the book itself failed to sell, and it was a flop.
It did not sell.
And nothing happened for about 120 years.
And 120 years later,
Wilkins' universal measure became the decimal metric system,
that we're all familiar with.
The "metric system" part came from Wilkins,
and the "decimal" part came from Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson was in France at the time as an ambassador to France in the 1790s.
And before he went to France,
he worked with George Washington to produce a decimal currency for the USA.
And after he left France,
he put a proposal for a whole decimal measurement system to Congress,
but it failed.
Thomas Jefferson's philosophy can be summed up fairly simply.
He believed that to be a Democrat who belonged to a democracy,
you had to know about working out numbers and calculating things,
just as a voter, to be a voter.
And he symbolized this - with my emphasis -
as doing things in plain number.
Let's now apply these principles to our modern life.
For example,
babies are born,
and the first thing that happens to them: they're put onto a set of scales.
Now, these are highly, highly, highly sophisticated scales
to allow for the wriggling of babies, probably.
What they do is they measure the baby's mass over and over again
and then use a highly sophisticated technique
to analyze the statistics of those measurements.
That way, you can measure babies accurately and precisely
right down to a single gram.
Then, if the baby changes its body mass a few days later,
you know which direction it's going in.
Babies are supposed to go up in body mass,
so if one goes down at all, even by a small amount,
then you know that that baby is in some sort of trouble.
It might have a congenital thing.
It might have a pepsin infection,
and if that's the case,
then you need to know exactly how much the baby mass is
so that you can figure out how many micro-grams of treatment you need
for how many grams of baby.
But people are working against this.
Without a policy for baby mass,
other forces operate.
For example, if an uncle drops by - we'll call him Jeremiah -
and Uncle Jeremiah sees a number like 3387,
he'll immediately change it to 3.4 kilograms.
Grandma Geraldine might drop by,
and if she drops by,
then she will change that immediately by asking one of the nursing staff,
"Oh, what's that in pounds and ounces?"
Now, neither of these people intend to hurt the baby,
but if this baby drops by that 36 grams,
Uncle Jeremiah's method won't work.
Grandma Geraldine's method definitely won't work.
And Grandma Geraldine needs to think about averages and reference points
like "What's a small baby?"
"What's a big baby?" "What's a medium baby?"
In Uncle Jeremiah's case,
he has been successful
all through the rest of the medical community.
And the rest of the medical community uses his principle of decimals,
shifting decimals backwards, and forwards, and so on,
and as he does that, a lot of errors are made.
These errors lead to deaths,
deaths that are unnecessary,
because of the lack of a policy for measurements.
Ninety-eight thousand people die from medical errors in the USA every year,
and most of these medical errors are medication errors,
and a lot of people are dying from or suffering from those errors.
They don't need to do this. We don't need this fault.
They could use the principle used in the building industry in Australia,
which has been highly successful with their metrication program.
The building industry in Australia has a policy of measuring all lengths
in millimeters.
They also have a policy of measuring things like areas -
say, the area of the roof of this house -
in square meters.
They've actually written down this policy, and here it is here.
That is, we will measure in millimeters, meters, and kilometers
where we've got to bring stuff onto the site.
But they also specifically say what measurements won't be used.
In this case, the centimeter shall not be used;
it'll never be written down and will never be used in the calculation.
The metrication policy
reduced the number of measuring words in the Australian building industry so much
that you can actually put all -
or the measures that you need for 99 percent of the work
in the building site -
and you can fit it all onto the back of a business card.
Not only is it simple in look,
it's simple in training.
You can train people with this in under a minute.
You can also know that with these simple measures
that on a building site in Australia,
in millimeters, without centimeters,
there are no fractions.
There're no common, vulgar fractions, no decimal fractions.
And because there're no decimal fractions, there're no decimal points,
so there's no sliding or slivering of decimal points from side to side.
You don't need any decimal fractions,
so you don't have decimal points on a building site.
They just don't exist.
And so everything is in whole numbers,
and everything is planned, designed, cut, and fitted simply
with simple whole numbers.
Not all companies, however, do this.
Other companies choose different ways of managing their metrication process.
At NASA, the metrication process started about 40 years ago,
and their policy was to go metric
if you feel like it.
This is a matter of choice. You choose.
Should you use millimeters or centimeters?
You choose.
And the net result is that one department would choose one way,
another department would choose another way.
And this image shows the Mars Climate Orbiter,
which left Earth successfully,
traveled through space for almost 12 months successfully,
and flew all that way in kilograms and meters per second,
and then another group took over to land it,
and they were working in pounds, and feet, and inches, and ounces,
and they slowed it down too much
so that instead of going into orbit, it went into the atmosphere, burnt up,
and whatever was left of it was splattered all over the surface of Mars,
at the cost of 327.6 million dollars
according to the inquiry they had later on.
Three hundred and twenty-seven -
a lot of money.
Saving millions is about saving money.
Recall those 98,000 people who die every year in the United States,
with medical accidents.
They cost 3.8 billion dollars per year.
Also recall that, in Australia,
we successfully changed the building industry
over to metric in a two-year period.
That was very, very quick.
And at the end of that time,
I was working with a company
where we did a whole survey of the contractors and subcontractors,
and we worked out that they were saving 10 percent
on their gross turnover.
They were saving 10 percent,
and they've saved that every year since 1974 till now,
and that will continue.
Again, back in the United States,
Richard Phelps has studied education in the United States,
and he's worked out that of all the kids in the United States,
they all have to spend an extra year of mathematics education
just to learn stuff that they'll never use.
And this costs probably about 10 percent of their budget.
In England,
the Confederation of British Industry did a survey back in 1990,
and they were a bit tighter
than we were probably in the Australian house builders,
and they worked out that the companies that went fully metric
saved nine percent of their turnover
every year from 1990 till now.
So when I said The Mars Climate Orbiter, 327.6 million dollars was a lot of money,
think in terms of these.
This is a lot, a lot, a lot of money.
Let's now move on to a broader issue.
And this is an image of our planet Earth, where we live,
and it's taken in 1968,
and it shows the Earth in space, rising above the Moon's horizon.
And we live in that atmosphere,
and, currently,
we think about how much energy is flowing into that atmosphere,
how much energy is flowing out of that atmosphere,
and how much is man-made.
These are crucial issues.
I've been interested in this issue since the early '80s,
and I've just been watching what the politicians say,
what the journalists say, what the pundits say,
what the scientists say,
what the other deniers and all those people say.
And a bit over a year ago,
I started writing down how they measure the energy.
Every time I heard a word that described energy on this planet,
I wrote it down.
I am not obsessive.
(Laughter)
But this is what I found:
all of these different words to measure energy.
There are things like atomic energy, barrels of oil equivalent,
lots, and lots of calories, lots, and lots of British thermal units,
and all of different sizes,
and a lot of them ill-defined.
A hundred and ninety-nine old measuring words
need 39,402 conversion factors
for even the most basic politician to understand,
for even a journalist to understand.
Other than that, they'd have to use the metric system,
and there's one word: it's a joule.
Now, all forms of energy can be measured with just one measuring word.
Let me give you an example from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
You can see that they've taken the industry figures
and just popped them into this paragraph.
If I was doing it, I would use joules.
Then I'd use a prefix,
in this case "peta," one with 15 naughts after it.
But that way,
I get all of these numbers in whole numbers,
and I can see straight away which is big, which is small, which is tiny.
And I think even politicians might be able to come to terms
with one measuring word for one thing.
On a world-wide basis,
we need this sort of thinking,
otherwise we are never going to understand energy flows
into the atmosphere of our planet.
So, let me move on.
To my mind,
the key of all of this is a process called metrication.
That is how you go about changing from all that old stuff
to the modern stuff.
It doesn't matter whether it's a world environment,
doesn't matter whether it's babies, doesn't matter whether it's buildings.
How do you go from all that old confusion
to the simplicity of using the metric system?
To my mind,
I would ask you to consider being or becoming a metrication leader.
Now, you only have to do one in four things, I think.
One: whenever you see two measurements,
pick the simple.
Don't go for the complex.
If you are trying for communication with other people,
always try for honest.
Don't try for obscure.
Remember what I said about the barrels of oil?
The oil industry uses that, and the barrel never existed.
And also go for things that are open, go for things with whole numbers.
Remember that maternity hospital?
If you have a whole number of grams,
even the most junior trainee nurse can understand what's going on
and that the baby's going up, down, or whatever.
Same with an apprentice on a building site.
They can understand whole numbers and do it that way.
And fourthly, choose worldwide standards,
adopt the metrication process, and use it.
Thank you.
(Applause)