American Landscape. I just finished reading a great book on the history of measures that we use in America, where they came from and why we chose them (and still choose them) as opposed to the metric system. It's called Measuring America, by Andro Linklater, and English journalist. Hechronicless the journey that standards for measures took from the chaos of trade in the 1500s to the standards of Elizabeth I to the standardization of measures in the United States and the Metric system of France.
Apparently things were pretty chaotic even in the U.S. until after the revolution when Jefferson and a cadre of others pushed hard to make one set of measures for length, liquid, weight and money. Jefferson a student of the European enlightenment of the 18th century, and he was aware and a part of the philosophy that spawned the metric system in France. He pushed for a decimalized system of units for all measures. This would help even the common man handle them, they theorized, as understanding factors of 10 in easier to handle.
Congress did agree with him on the money issue. The dollar was decimalized, but there was a resistance to decimalize what had been used to stamp out the land for the last 150 years, the foot and the mile. Indeed even while they debated, settlement of the lands between theAppalachianss and the Mississippi was carving up the landscape like wildfire. And what they were measuring it in was Gunter's chain, the surveying tool invented by Edmund Gunter in the early 1500s.
The metric system was introduced in France in the late 1790s, but widespread acceptance didn't occur for decades. Resistance came from the general populous. The metric system was the measure of the scientist and was enacted from the top down. It was hard to change from the old measure, which had been organic in origin. Based on natural things, body parts and such, they made more sense to people. Gunter's chain was a good example of this, as it was 22 meters, or four times the length of the plot of land commonly thought to be the amount of land that could be worked by one person in one day.
The landscape of America is recorded and measured with the units decided by congress when the country began. Look in any kitchen or toolshed. Look at the landscape or any platt map. Changing to metric would be a monumental, and indeed the government has tried before to at least integrate metric with U.S. units, but not very successfully.
Anyway, I enjoyed it. The geographic landscape of this country bears the mark of Gunter's chain.
(Entry note: I wrote this earlier, much better I think, and the connection failed and I lost my work. This entry will have to do, so I hope you enjoy what's left. R...)