Questions Asked: US Measurements, Metric, a Botanist

From Australia to Afghanistan, Zambia to New Zealand the world measures in metric. Except that is, for Liberia, Burma and, of course, the world's scientific leader, the United States of America. Why, we are often asked? Since this involves a famous botanist, we are happy to explain. And for those of you who have no interest in botanists, also involved are pirates, politicians and republicans (French this time). But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

French botanist, physician and explorer Joseph Dombey was not the luckiest man of science. It commenced when he was one of four scientists on a Franco-Spanish expedition to explore South America 1777-84. Commented B.J. Healey (1975): Their adventures were so confused, complex, extravagant, and sometime contradictory, that they demand a volume in themselves and any attempt at a brief account of them would be doomed to failure before it started. They were unique among plant hunters in that Dombey is reputed to have handed out considerable sums of money with unfailing generosity, though where he got it from remains a mystery . . . Dombey dispatched his extensive botanical collection by sea, destined for Paris. Alas for him, the British and French were engaged on one of their frequent bouts of hostilities. In what became known as the 'Dombey Affair" his entire collection was seized by the Brits on the high seas and diverted to British Museum. They remain there to the present day. The unfortunate Joseph did, however, eventually make it back home. Meanwhile, back in France the metric system, based on tens, was first proposed by the French astronomer and mathematician Gabriel Mouton (1618-94) Perhaps because in French his name sounds sheepish, it took a century after his death for it to really catch on. Then the French Revolution ushered in a Republican Government in the 1790s intent on creating scientific socialist paradise. Voila--metric became standardized. One admirer of this advance in science was the great American Thomas Jefferson, at that time Secretary of State. What could be a better idea then, decided the French, than to dispatch a distinguished representative such as Joseph Dombey to their sister republic. He would carry standardizations of the metric system to present to Congress: a metre rod and a kilogram copper cylinder. The latter, perhaps ominously, was known as a 'grave.'

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So, once again, in 1793, Dombey sailed across the broad Atlantic--and once again was intercepted. This time, driven off course by storms into the Caribbean, he was pounced upon by pirates. Actually, they were privateers sailing under British letters. The difference was academic. Poor Joseph lost his metric measures, auctioned off, and, eventually, imprisoned on Montserrat his life, dying in prison there aged 52. Not to be deterred from spreading scientific enlightenment, France dispatched a representative to replace the unfortunate Dombey. But times were a-changing. The United States had a new Secretary of State, one Edmund Randolph, who was not a fan of the new-fangled measurements. So, if slowly, the world came around to embrace the marvels of metric. All, that is, other than the United States of America, along with Liberia and Burma. And it continues to the present day.