John B. Marek is a storyteller with dirt under his nails who weaves tales inspired by a lifetime immersed in nature. His insightful essays and award-winning fiction delve into the complexities of sustainable living, the heart of rural communities and the thrill of outdoor adventure. You can find more of his writing at johnbmarek.com.
Back in the 1970s, sitting in my elementary school classroom, I remember the teacher exuberantly telling us that we needed to master the metric system because imperial measurements were on their way out. She spoke of liters and meters with an almost religious fervor, assuring us that by the time we grew up, pounds and inches would be quaint relics of the past. Well, here we are, 50 years later, and I’m still buying my lumber by the foot, my milk by the gallon and my hamburger by the pound. Like many predictions about the future, that one didn’t quite pan out.
The stubborn persistence of imperial measurements, particularly in the United States, tells us something fascinating about human nature. We tend to cling to measurements that make intuitive sense to us, that connect with our daily experience. A foot is roughly the length of, well, a foot. A pound feels like something you can hold in your hand. A meter? That’s an abstraction, a scientific calculation based on the speed of light. Perfectly logical, but not exactly warm and fuzzy.
This human tendency to measure things in relatable ways has given us some truly fascinating units of measurement throughout history. Take the knot, for instance – it’s still used by sailors and pilots today, but its origin story is pure human ingenuity. Back in the 16th century, sailors would throw a wooden board (called a log) into the water, attached to a rope with knots tied at regular intervals. They’d count how many knots played out while a small hourglass measured time. Simple, practical and surprisingly accurate. One knot meant you were traveling at one nautical mile per hour, and the term stuck even after we developed much fancier ways to measure speed.
Then there’s the “click” – a term I particularly love because it shows how language and measurement can evolve from the ground up. During the Vietnam War, American soldiers started using “click” to mean kilometer, partly because of the clicking sound their rifle sights made when adjusting for range, and partly because it was just easier to say over a static-filled radio. It’s not an official unit of measurement, but it became real through use and necessity.
Some measurements seem almost comically specific to their purposes. Consider the “hand,” still used today to measure horses. It’s exactly what it sounds like – the width of a human palm, standardized to four inches during Henry VIII’s reign. Every horse person I’ve ever met uses hands to measure horse height, and they’d look at you funny if you tried to use feet or meters instead.
The British “stone” for measuring weight is another weird example of how measurements can become cultural touchstones. Originally based on actual stones used as counterweights in markets, it settled at 14 pounds and became so ingrained in British culture that even today, despite using metric for most other things, many Brits still give their weight in stones and pounds. Try telling someone who’s always thought of themselves as “11 stone” that they’re 69.85 kilograms, and watch their eyes glaze over.
Even our shoe sizes come from an agricultural measurement – the barleycorn. Three barleycorns equaled an inch in medieval England, and somehow this grain-based measurement became the foundation for how we size our footwear. Each U.K. or U.S. shoe size still differs from the next by one-third of an inch, or one barleycorn. It’s delightfully absurd when you think about it, but it works.
In more modern times, we’ve created equally peculiar measurements for specialized needs. Oceanographers measure massive water flow in sverdrups (named after oceanographer Harald Sverdrup), where one sverdrup equals a million cubic meters of water per second. The Gulf Stream moves about 30 sverdrups worth of water – a number that would be unwieldy in more conventional units.
Looking back at my teacher’s confident predictions about the metric system’s inevitable dominance, I can’t help but smile. They weren’t wrong about its logical superiority or its importance in science and international trade. What they didn’t account for was human nature – our attachment to familiar ways of measuring the world around us, our love of tradition, and our tendency to create and keep measurements that feel right, even when they’re not particularly rational.
Perhaps that’s the real lesson here: Measurement isn’t just about precision and standardization. It’s about how we, as humans, make sense of our world. Sometimes that means using the most logical system available, and sometimes it means measuring a horse in hands because that’s just how it’s done.