Metric System

by the Dozens

By Guy Gugliotta

Admit it. Basically you wouldn't know a meter, a kilo, a cc or a degree Celsius if it was standing in front of you making an obscene gesture. You have tried to get interested in the metric system, but you still can't do it, and you still hate it.

You aren't alone. Despite the government-promoted rush (actually crawl) toward "metrication," a group of people actually has a rationale about why the metric system is a stupid French invention in need of decent burial.

"Why are we spending all this time on something that is second best?" said Nassau Community College math professor Gene Zirkel. "There is something easier and better around, and many people know about it."

Zirkel, 63, is past president and gray eminence of the Dozenal Society of America, which, as its name implies, is interested in the number 12. In fact, the Dozenal Society is convinced that 12 is a much better way to go than 10.

"There is not one single instance of any country accepting the metric system voluntarily," Zirkel said. Even the French, who invented metrics, had to enforce compliance.

Zirkel is one of the more civil members of the anti-metric crowd, a small but sneering bunch increasingly annoyed with scientists, bureaucrats and other pointy-heads' propensity to bow down to what Dozenal Society founder F. Emerson Andrews described in 1934 as "the number-God 10."

For this reason, a 1994 column detailing the Commerce Department's 20-year effort to convert the republic to the metric system became a cult favorite in the underground.

"It is only in popular documents (such as your article) that decimal metric is sold as `easier,' " said Andrew Denny in a humiliating broadside from the Dozenal Society of Great Britain. "That is the sort of repetition passed along from person to person like the admiration of the emperor's clothes."

Bureaucrats might deal in tens,

Denny said, but the metric system "is useless in the real world." According to Zirkel, human beings count by tens only because of the unfortunate biological accident of having 10 fingers. When the species measures things, the inclination is to use 12.

And not only 12 inches to a foot, Zirkel notes. There are 12 items per dozen, 12 dozen per gross (the origin of the word "grocer'), 12 hours on the clock, 12 x 2 hours in a day, 12 x 5 seconds in a minute, 12 x 5 minutes in an hour, 12 tones in a musical scale, 12 x 30 degrees in a circle.

"In the real world, you work in halves, quarters and thirds," Denny said, and you want things to come out even. With 12, halves, quarters, thirds and sixths are whole numbers. With 10, you get fractions: "Try dividing ten eggs," Denny suggested.

Gerard C. Iannelli, Metric Program director for the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology said he "hadn't thought in terms of an anti-metric underground," but acknowledged, "We've gotten emotional comment in the areas that I would call `cultural.' " People don't like Celsius on their thermometers, he said, or metric speed limits.

Since "cultural" doesn't affect trade, which is where Commerce concentrates, the feds are leaving culture alone, Iannelli added. This is probably wise. "I am a fairly ordinary guy, but do you know that in a few years it will be a criminal offense to buy a pound of potatoes?" Denny said. "I hate the metric system."

Base 12 arithmetic may seem daunting, but Zirkel maintains the complexity is illusory. Teach children the dozenal system and the "abominable" decimal metric system, he says, and let them pick what they want: Base 10 would disappear.

Guy Gugliotta covers national news for The Washington Post.