Temperature Units and US Constitution

I was in college (learning to be an engineer) when the push to introduce metric units (the MKS system) was being debated in the US; a large number of people favored this--enough to get us part way converted and create a lot of confusion.  My professors all were in favor of this conversion, so I was taught using the metric system, acceleration from gravity was 9.8.

After graduating I was thrust into the real world, populated by managers and senior engineers who had spent there entire professional lives using english units of measure.  One of these ranted that he did not understand why we had to begin using kilograms of force-- he could see no reason to change.  

The federal government eventually began requiring metric units to be used in all government contracts.  At the time the weight of the helicopter my company was working on was being tracked in the old (english unit) weights and balance computer system.  The company wrote a quick program to switch form english to MKS units.  There was enormous concern and confusion when the total aircraft tabulated weight increased about 50 kg more than the converted tabulated weight in pounds.  (Until someone remembered rounding errors.)

I think we all have incidents with unit conversions.  My was in a model basin in Cork.  We were comparing two loads cells for testing.  The engineer I was working with compared the two load cell using the supplied data sheet.  One was in kg and the other was in Newton.  Both were made in Europe.  So much for the metric system. 

There was such a PC “Wang-2200”. An interpreter of the BASIC programming language was sewn into it.

By default, this computer started up, set to angular degrees. But after executing the SELECT R or SELECT G operator in BASIC, the calculations were carried out in radians (R) or in grad (G).

There was such a joke. The programmer turned away, and someone replaced degrees with grad. If the replacement were for radians, then the catch would be immediately noticed. But grad do not differ much from degrees - you can create a calculation, but do not feel the substitution until the answer seems strange.

Once I sat with my American colleague at an American airport and there was nothing to do (we were expecting our flight), we began to discuss the transition in US aviation from British units to SI. My colleague said that if someone somewhere sees British units at the airport and informs the airport administration about it, he will receive a big bonus. As we walked toward the plane, I saw a height mark on the gate, not in meters, but in feet and inches. I showed it to my colleague. He said that this is the only exception to the rule and they do not give a bonus for it!