Abstract
IN. the year 1917, when the nation was in the throes of war, a committee of the Conjoint Board of Scientific-Societies, arrived at certain conclusions on the question of the compulsory adoption of the metric system in Great Britain, but, unfortunately for the committee, the publication of its findings has been delayed until the present time.1 During the intervening three years our attention has been transferred from warlike to peaceful occupations, and the nation at large is now much more alive to the necessity of improving our commercial equipment for the impending vital struggle to recover and expand our overseas trade in order that we may “pay for the war.” The committee apparently appreciates this change in the general atmosphere, and has accordingly published an apologetic prefatory note, from which it incidentally appears that the chief source of its evidence was the “Report on Commercial and Industrial Policy after the War.” It may be recalled that Lord Balfour of Burleigh, the chairman of that committee, naïvely admitted afterwards, during a House of Lords debate on decimal coinage, that his committee had been so overloaded with other problems that the subject of decimalisation had possibly not received the attention it really deserved.
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ALLCOCK, H. The Metric System and International Trade. Nature 106, 169–170 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/106169a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/106169a0