The Metric System: Why Need A Standardized System

For many, recalling their mathematics classes can be harrowing. The horror of theorems, formulae as well as calculus, integration and differentiation, and those strange yet scary symbols—that snaky integral and spooky summation—had created intractable mazes and hard-to-solve equations. When these monsters are kept aside, among topics covered in the syllabus, it seemed, units and their conversion were the easiest. All you needed was a simple division or multiplication to convert from unit to another, for example for a temperature conversion.

However, conversely, in the real world, unit conversion for centuries had been a source of confusion among traders, the scientific community, and academics, as almost all great civilizations have their own system.

When it was realized that the variations in the measurements of units, especially around the Second World War, as the UK and the USA allied to defeat Germany, is leading to a number of issues in the war. A famous example is of a nut and bolt; at that time, the UK and the USA had their own system, a nut and bolt made in the US was rendered useless in the UK. In the times of war, simple temperature conversion such as Celsius toFahrenheit could lead to bigger problems, triggering dominoes effect.

Later with the conclusion of the war, a number of conferences were organized to make units uniform all around the world.

Governments and organization were made aware of benefits of a uniform unit system. The concerted efforts lead to the formulation of the metric system. It has following advantages.

·         In the metric system, it is made sure that the measuring units are interlinked. The units are multiples of 10 or divisible by 10, making it easier to interchange.

·         Probability of error is low, as fractions were discarded for the decimal system.

·         It led the global compatibility of machines and machine parts. Parts made in the UK can be easily used in Italy, and vice versa. This standardization gave a major push to the world trade.

·         It helped the scientific community the most, as lab appliances as well as publishing papers became easy.

However, even after all this effort, the metric system has not been embraced completely, which is still creating issues. Hope, sooner or later, we will have a uniform system, though until then keep using unit converters.