In search of ‘meter’ meanings

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, November 25, 2008

I went in search of the origin of that unit of metric measure called a “meter.” You have to admit: It’s a weird length, 39.34 inches, more or less. Maybe this oddness isn’t relevant to you, but it is to me because, in the teaching of electricity to students, there are all kinds of metric units, like kilo, and mega, and milli and micro. It seemed important to me to tell these students about the origin of a basic unit of measurement which is used not only so much in the electrical world but is also pasted across one side of everyones’ automobile speedometer.

Weren’t we supposed to be converted to this wonderful system of measures by now? In fact, wasn’t this supposed to have happened something like 40 years ago?

I remember thinking, while studying engineering at the University of Iowa, that politicians were going to make things really hard on me if I had just managed to master one system of pressures, weights and distances, only to have to transpose everything into some other one.

France, I know, is responsible for the metric system. In Vietnam, I had exposure to some of the things that France left behind them in regard to all this.

First, since French schools have a numerical grading system based on getting all your points on a test out of a total of 10, we found ourselves faced with a confused civilian population who often said: “American GI number 10!” They would be smiling and bowing and to all evidence quite pleased with themselves to be congratulating us for saving them not only from the communists but the French, too.

(At the time, I thought we were only saving them from becoming communist. It is only later that I have come to realize that saving them from the French may have been the larger accomplishment.)

Anyway, at the time, we soldiers all suspected that the Vietnamese peasantry really did know that we knew that we were number one, because once in a while they would slip up and smile and tell us so. Except then, we didn’t know if they were not in fact accusing us of having flunked out and fallen into the metric system’s dunce category. After all, a one on a test isn’t much.

It was in Vietnam, also, that I first heard the term of measurement called a “klick.” A klick was a thousand meters, and originated from the branch of the army that operated artillery pieces.

It seems that one klick on the coarse adjustment elevation knob resulted in the explosive shell landing another thousand meters further away. This may or may not be true; that was what we were told. Who knows. Maybe GIs just called a kilo a klick to save saying one syllable.

A long time after Vietnam, a young French exchange student came and stayed with us for about half a summer. Since he was reasonably adept in using tape measures marked in the metric system, I got some and learned to use them also. It is a much preferable system, it turns out, much as I hate to give the French any credit.

I tell students about the system being easy. They don’t believe me. “No more fractions,” I tell them. The look on their faces tells me they know it’s another trick of some sort. “Really,” I assure them, “it’s a system of decimals; you just add them together.” I show them how you can add point one and point one and get point two, whereas in our system, you’d have to add one-tenth to one-tenth.

They still don’t believe me. After all, they’ve seen those meters per hour markings on their speedometers.

As I was saying about saving Vietnam from the French, the insufferable attitude of my foreign exchange student pretty much convinced me of that. Except for how cheap our cigarettes were, and Levi blue jeans, we had nothing that was anywhere as near as good as anything French. After a while, this arrogance of his grew pretty old. “Holland kicked France’s butt once,” I told him one day. “Non, non,” he assured me. “So did Spain,” I replied. “Non, non,” he emphatically replied.

“Everyone in Europe has kicked France’s butt,” I said.

“Non, non.” No way could I convince him.

“Do you know why the new French navy has glass windows in the bottoms of their ships?” I asked him.

“Non,” he replied.

“So they can see the old French navy,” I told him. He didn’t get it.

Anyway, back to the origin of the unit of measurement called a meter. It is, it turns out, one-ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole, on a line drawn through — you guessed it — France.

Where else.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.