the Society. I am sure that the start of five hundred or a thousand members would be lost if the officers were indifferent-if they had not positive enthusiasm in promoting good papers, good discussions, good meetings, and an interested and working membership. And a good Secretary is the concentration of good management.

Meetings should not be too infrequent. The Society cannot soon have a local habitation. The Mining Engineers and the Iron and Steel Institute have none; but they have three meetings a year in different parts of the country, which give distant members home facilities from time to time, and keep up the Society interest. Frequent local meetings are necessarily small and often spiritless; members are not stimulated to write or to discuss.

Finally, the rapid and healthy growth of the Society will largely depend on the character of the first few years' papers. With men of work and of note for early officers, and a goodly number of really important and well-written papers at the start, the success of the Society of Mechanical Engineers is assured.

[TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS.]

THE METRIC SYSTEM-IS IT WISE TO INTRODUCE IT INTO OUR MACHINE SHOPS?

BY COLEMAN SELLERS, M. E.

Read at the Annual Meeting, 1880.

THE organization of a Society of Mechanical Engineers offers a convenient and fitting opportunity for the presentation of the views of a mechanical engineer on the subject of the metric system to members of his own profession, and to those who are similarly interested. During the month of May, 1874, I had the honor of reading before the American Railway Master Mechanics' Association a paper on "The Metric System in our Workshop: will its value in practice be an equivalent for the cost of its introduction?" In that paper I treated the subject mainly in reference to its cost. From what has since been published by those who advocate the enforced substitution of the metric system for the weights and measures in common use in this country, it is evident that the subject will bear to advantage a different treatment. I now propose to supplement the question of cost by an endeavor to show that the system, per se, is not so well adapted to the wants of machinists as is the one now in use, and that its enforced introduction will do harm to our industries in place of doing good.

In addressing, to the members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, arguments in opposition to any compulsory legislation in this direction, I feel that I am speaking to men who are familiar with the subject and who have already given thought to the results likely to obtain from the proposed change in the system. I feel, too, that I am speaking to those whose habit of thought fits them to consider the subject without bias; mechanical engineers, of all men using weights and measures, are the ones most eager to adopt what in the end will be of most use. To them weights and measures are not abstract ideas, but tangible substances. Engineers make the machines for weighing and measuring, and the result of their use of those machines exists as fixed matter, costing millions upon millions of dollars.

To the great bulk of mankind engaged in trade, in buying and selling, in bartering and exchanging, it matters little what system they adopt; it matters little whether they are obliged to use a yard

stick or a meter rod, pounds or kilogrammes, quarts or liters. The cost to them of a change from one to the other is the cost of the few devices needed in weighing and measuring; the rationale of the system may never enter their thoughts.

With the machinist the case is different. He must not only possess costly means of measuring and, weighing, with a degree of exactness unknown to others, but the results of these weights and measurements are fixed and unalterable. Enormous expenditures on tools, on drawings, on patterns, on everything he uses in making or building his machines are on what is involved in the primary system used in determining weight and size. The product of this expenditure means everything that makes modern civilization possible. I propose, in this paper, to consider the subject only as it relates to our own profession; not in regard to its effect on the grocer, the dry-goods man, or on the druggist. I propose to show why, after nearly twenty years' constant use of the metric system of measurement, I record my opposition to any enforcing legislation in this direction, because the metric system is not well adapted to the practice of the machine shop.

To render my arguments of any value I must endeavor to express myself so as to be understood by those who are not mechanics, and must crave the indulgence of my associates for dwelling, as I shall have to, on details so familiar to them and for making my explanation of the usages of the workshop so elementary.

For nearly twenty years one large department of Wm. Sellers & Co.'s establishment has been worked on the metric system, as thoroughly as the system can be worked in any machine shop; as thoroughly as it is worked in France or Germany. The drawings made for this department are to the metric scale, figured in millimeters. The small tools and gauges are to metric measurement only, and the product of the shop is scaled to metric sizes and called by names based on those sizes.

During all these years, and for many years before, we have taken pains to inform ourselves, so far as lay in our power, as to all possible good to be derived from the system, in the drawing room as well as in the shop. We inquired into its defects and endeavored to overcome them by the same means as are resorted to in metricusing countries. The system is urged by theorists as a perfect system. All nations, we are told, should adopt it to bring about a desirable unity in weights and measures, even if all cannot be made to speak our language and all cannot be equally good and pious, as measured by some international scale of goodness and piety..

The metric system was legalized here in May, 1866. Some of its enthusiastic advocates now urge its being made exclusive and obliga

tory. Societies are organized to teach its principles to the people, and much money has been expended in publishing, but up to this time few conveniences have been placed in the hands of mechanics to enable them to use it in their calculations. Some years ago (the conditions remain the same to-day) letters addressed to leading publishing houses asking for metric books in the English language, equivalent to those to which we constantly refer, which books are as necessary to us as are our other tools, failed to bring a single favorable answer. What was asked for, was some book in which formulæ shall be given in the most convenient form expressible in relation to the metric nomenclature. Many books can be found urging its merits as a system, and the writers of these, in showing (?) that the metric system can be learned entire in, say, fifteen minutes, may think they have done what is needed, but no book yet published in the English language, so far as I have been able to learn, even approximates to what is required. We have nothing like the handbooks published in German. These Germans, in teaching their people, gave side by side in these almanacs of mechanics the formulæ expressed in Prussian inches and in meters. When the year 1880 came around they dropped the Prussian inch from these books when it was possible so to do. There are many very good books of tables for the ready conversion of the measurements of one system into the other, but unless an engineer is as familiar with the metric system as with his own they aid him but little. On the other hand, our English work books are many and valuable. The great bulk of literature of primary importance to mechanical engineers is in English and expressed in feet and in inches.

The absence of these help books need not, however, prevent any one familiar with the metric system from using it in his practice. If he can think in the new system he can work in it too. He can formulate what is directly needful to him if he will take the time and trouble so to do. The absence of these books has not prevented us from using it or familiarizing ourselves with it, and had it proved worth the effort, and possible, we would long ago have placed ourselves in position to advocate it, as none can knowingly do who have not tried it. In designing any engineering work, proportioned structures can be produced by either scale; the working drawings can be then made to whatever system obtains in the shop of erection. This change from one or the other system in the drawing room is a matter of no difficulty whatever. The change from one system to the other in the workshop, however, involves more than the usual advocates conceive of.

To show the measure of the misapprehensions, as regards its effect on our profession, on the part of the enthusiastic advocates of the

exclusive metric system, I will pass by some lesser lights and seek illumination from the central luminary.

Mr. Frederick A. P. Barnard, S.T.D., LL.D., who, besides being President of Columbia College, in New York City, is also President of the American Metric Bureau, and of the American Metrological Society, etc., etc., said, Dec. 27, 1877: "It is now little more than a dozen years since the movement in favor of the reform of the confused metrological system of the United States was set on foot. Originating with a few advanced thinkers" (the italics are mine) "and regarded with indifference by the multitude, it encountered, as it is the fate of all efforts to emancipate mankind from the burden of traditional evils, to encounter a much larger degree of opposition than of encouragement." Then, after denouncing many of those who oppose the forced introduction of the system (see page 279 and elsewhere in his Metric System) he says, on page 283 of the same book: "Among the arguments urged by those who maintain the impossibility of change only one appears to have much force, and that is the argument drawn from the dependency of machinery upon minute exactness in the measurements of parts, and from the great expense which would attend the adaptation of machine shops and machines to a new system." Quoting the majority report of the Franklin Institute as to probable cost, and referring to the second report of the committee of the New York University Convocation, in which report the number of dimensions requiring separate indications on the drawings of a twenty-five-horse-power steam engine are given, he continues: "Singularly enough these statements, and all the rest of the same class in both the reports referred to, instead of being arguments against the abolition of the present metrological system and the substitution of the metric for it, afford the strongest reason for believing that that is precisely the thing which ought to be done. We desire, I suppose, to create a demand for our steam engines and our manufacturing machinery on the continent of Europe." "But a steam engine or a machine, all of whose parts are measured in English linear measures, if transferred to a metric country and there, by accident, disabled, becomes nearly useless, since the shops of such a country afford no facilities for repairing it," etc., (the italics again my own).

*

It seems needless to tell engineers that these statements show so entire an ignorance on the part of Mr. Barnard of the merits of the case as can scarce be credited from such a source. I feel ashamed to tender to him an explanation of what is involved.

The unit of measurement used in making a machine does not in any way complicate the repairs of that machine. Machines built in England do not always agree with any of our even sizes, yet