Measurement and humanity

Thanks to Mikey Day and Nate Bargatze, the human aspects of measurement are fresh and vivid.

Rob James

October 22, 2025

The George Washington Saturday Night Live skits written by Mikey Day and led by Nate Bargatze deliciously skewer crazy American language usage and weights and measures. (Their Nashville Christmas skit is of like kind and quality.) When the laughter subsides it is interesting to see not only that the measurement systems are crazy, but also that there is a method to their madness. Here are my notes from reading a fascinating book: James Vincent’s Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants (2023).

Old measures were commonly based on human body parts. Cubits from forearm, spans from outstretched hand, pace from a five-foot or so left-right step (our “mile” comes from Latin mille passus a thousand soldier paces), inch based on three barleycorns, feet based on some mythical king’s foot, fathom from a male wingspan, about 6 feet.

The measures originally varied with the environment. The “nilometer” was a cistern that measured the early inflow from the Nile onto the surrounding land. A rise of only 12 feet meant a drought, while a rise of 24 feet meant a flood. An hour could be 32 or 84 minutes at different times of day or year, which messed up monks’ prayer routines. Both the environment and the human metrics were fickle. Even a lunar month varies as much as half a day—only the average is 29d 12h 44’ 2.8”. Same for year, more precisely 365.2422 days.

Many old measures were useful to allocate things fairly, not mechanically and rigidly. A Finnish distance measure was “as far as a dog’s bark is heard” (6 km, varying with terrain and wind), an Irish land measure collop was “land sufficient to graze a cow” (could be more or less depending on quality of soil), and a German wage measure was Tagswerk (“a day’s work,” which varied by how hard the work and working conditions were). Then we come to the English “Furh lang” = the length of a furrow plowed by an ox before the animal tuckered out and had to rest, a vague measure which was further variable depending on soil, rocky ground, weather, etc. Pretty sensible measures all, except mebbe that dog-bark one.

But then officials stepped in and made everything rigid. The furh lang was standardized as the furlong, exactly 660 feet. A chain is a tenth of that, 66 feet. The chain was composed of 100 links each 7.92 inches. 25 links make a rod.

Strips of land were narrow, Tennessee-shaped, so everyone could get access to the local stream or river: one furlong long by one chain across. How big is that? Why, glad you asked: 660 x 66 = 43,560 square feet. That’s one aecer (“open field”) or acre.

A mile is 8 furlongs by the way; so that, General Washington, is where our strange 5280-feet measure comes from. A square mile is 640 acres. And 36 square miles is a 6x6 township in the US geological surveys of the bulk of the country.

Grain was measured and transacted based on the capacity of a vessel, not weight or strictly by volume. A standard bushel is 8 gallons. A big issue whether the grain was shaken to remove air pockets and settle in, adding more stuff to the pour. So regulations said the grain had to be dropped into the bushel from a standard height, no more no less. Another issue was whether the top of the vessel was heaped, or instead was leveled with a blade or palette knife called a “strickle.”

The second, the smallest unit of time, historically was based on a continuous flow of a substance like the movement of the sundial’s shadow, the tallow of a candle, falling water, or dripping sand. That continuity was replaced first by a pendulum, then by a tensioned spring with an escapement ratchet, and then by quartz vibrations, each time making time more and more discrete instead. Now a “second” is based on the “hyperfine transition frequency” of an atom of caesium-133, which vibrates exactly 9,192,631,770 times per defined “second.”

Temperature scales started with Celsius, but Fahrenheit made it easier to use (32 F and 212 F were considered easier to work with than 0 C and 100 C for normal situations involving subfreezing conditions). 98.6 F is about 37 C. Absolute zero (-273.15 C, -459.67 F) hypothesized by Lord Kelvin long before it was approached in practice.

The metric system was fatefully instituted during French Revolution. That system features the metre (1/10-millonth of distance from North Pole to equator through Paris) and kilogram (an actual metal thing in Paris, carefully polished with a chamois cloth of defined weight and pressure, based on weight of 10 deciliters of recently melted icewater!). The revolutionary calendar (with months like Napoleon’s (and later Marx’s) Brumaire and the post-Robespierre Thermidor) and clock (10 hours in a day) did not survive. Napoleon initially reversed much of these innovations. Then the measurement system (not decimal money, the calendar or the clock) came back in a big way with nationalism throughout Europe and Latin America, as an opportunity to sweep away old and conflicting local measures. “We have made Italy, now we must make Italians,” and one way to do that was to use a new metric system in lieu of regional measures. (In many countries, though, the handy 500-gram measure is still called the local equivalent of a “pound”--livre in French, Pfund in German, libbra in Italy.)

Thomas Jefferson, a fan of France and its revolutionaries as we know from the sometimes historically unreliable Broadway show Hamilton, pushed for the metric system, and at least got the dollar of 100 pennies going in the US—way before other metric currencies. But Jefferson himself didn’t like the French chauvinism of the metre, being based on the longitude running through Paris to the equator; besides, scientists had known since 1672 that the earth was not spherical, that measurements in Peru showed further distance from earth’s center than same measurements in Arctic. (Isaac Newton offered that fact as proof of gravity; I weigh about a pound more at the North Pole than I do in the Andes because the Earth is squished a bit flat.) So even Jefferson paused on metrics. John Quincy Adams and other later Presidents saw any crusade to use the system as hopeless, almost traitorous to US ideals.

In 1893, the foot, pound and ounce were officially defined in the US – but in terms of metric units! The UK still is similarly schizophrenic—pubs serve beer in pints, many road signs show miles.

The 1975 US Metric Conversion Act proposed a national changeover. (A bit earlier than that is when my Salinas junior high-school friend Jeff Carpenter and I started to talk about kilograms and kilometers, getting ourselves ready for the inevitable changeover.) That crusade stalled in the 1978 energy crisis amid general US chauvinism. The auto industry and the US military moved over to metric, as members of a global village, but few other sectors of the US economy followed suit. Ronald Reagan scrapped the program in the early 1980s. There is not much hope of its return. The metric units are now themselves based on elementary particle or atomic constants. (James Clerk Maxwell: any measure based on the Earth is unreliable, as the planet itself and all of its large components even water molecules are changing and variable.) “Deciliters of water” was an imprecise measure of the mass of a kilogram—what exact temperature, salinity, impurities, etc.?

So now in SI (French Système international d'unités) a meter is the distance a light photon travels in a vacuum in one 299,792,458th of a second. Other measures like the kilogram and degree Kelvin are now based on the Planck constant 6.626 x 10^-33 J sec, the Boltzmann constant 1.380649×10^−23 J/K, Avogadro’s number, Coulomb’s number, and something for luminosity. There are seven fundamental units and you can then use them to derive other units. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units.

Recently a Fox News screen read “Is the metric system completely made up?” Well, isn’t everything devised by our species? As Immanuel Kant said, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” The poetry of the collop is forever lost.