Measurement in America Imagine a scenario where each state has its own names for measuring things, and even when they use the same names, the actual measures aren’t the same. Imagine trying to develop commerce between the two states. It probably would not happen as customers would be wary of the various measurements and the confusion that would result, not to mention the abuse that unscrupulous merchants could inflict upon the system. I think you would agree that for basic commerce to take place, we need to have a consistent system of weights and measurements. This scenario actually existed in the United States just after the Revolutionary War. Back then the 13 states were really more like 13 independent countries barely enjoined in the “United” States of America. It was necessary for the nation to adopt one system of measurement and make it official everywhere, and also to ensure that merchants were being honest (hence the creation of the various bureaus of weights and measures). We could have easily gone metric back around 1790 but we didn’t. Much of that has to do with the concurrent need to measure, survey and stake land in the fast growing, westward-bound United States. Surveyors at that time (and today, for that matter), used a mixture of “links” and “chains” that when added up, gave us our current known measurements of furlongs and miles. Prior to about 1790, land was divided up by physical boundaries such as trees, rocks, creeks and hedges. This system was known as ‘metes and bounds’. The drawback to this method was that it was mostly inaccurate and it was prone to abuse. In the heavily forests or grassy plains, there weren’t easy ways to ‘see’ the land and to declare off boundaries. Instead, it was decided that a more consistent method of measure would be used in which land was measured off in a grid. The model for this measurement was the ‘township’, which had been in use in the New England region for awhile. Give or take some adjustments, the standard township for land measure was to be 6 miles by 6 miles, resulting in 36 actual square miles (each square mile is a ‘section’). Surveyors went out into the wilderness and marked off the miles, laboriously, for many years, but in time, the public lands surveys were completed so land could be bought, sold and speculated on, just like we do today. The idea of land as a commodity helped spur the westward advancement of the United States and gave it a very powerful economic force as well. Largely as a result of this decision to mark off lands in miles, we essentially kept the English measures and have done so up to the current day. The book “The Measuring of America” by Arlo Linklater is a great book that goes into detail the history of these measurement techniques as well as some of the controversy of adopting the English methods instead of the metric methods that arose back then. Literally the entire United States has been surveyed into townships and sections. Exceptions are places like the bayou of Louisiana, Hawaii and the outback of Alaska. The grid pattern of the streets in Phoenix is a result of this type of land measurement. The major streets all lie on a grid of section squares. Take a look at a large wall map of the metro Phoenix area someday and you’ll see the nice grid pattern clearly. In Gilbert, you’ll see places where the streets all ‘jog’ just south of the US-60 freeway. This is because someone way back when mis-measured some land and the townships did not match up! A similar ‘mess-up’ between Texas and New Mexico left a sliver of land about 1/8-mile wide by about 250 miles long unaccounted for… it went to New Mexico, but not without a fight. And recently (roughly the mid-1990s), the ‘exact’ boundary between Virginia and West Virginia had never been officially surveyed in some areas. In one region it was ‘the spine of the ridge’, but in the field the ridge was very broad and indistinct; they had to go and actually mark it off officially!Among other interesting tidbits: Because we tend to divide up things into halves and ‘halves of halves’ (quarters), eights, sixteenths, etc., land is divided up similarly. Sections tended to be divided up into eighths in both directions, leaving 64 individual little squares of land. A section is by definition 640 acres, so each of these little plots was exactly 10 acres in size – a good little homestead back then (and now, even!). Our streets tend to count up by 8s every mile. Addresses count up by a similar method (usually by 800s every mile). The furthest named street in Maricopa County to the west is 579th Avenue. Divide by 8 and you get that it’s roughly 72.5 miles west of downtown. There’s nothing to see out there, though! For the really dedicated, you can find the ‘surveyor’s-origin’ in the hills near Phoenix International Raceway in Avondale. It’s the point by which all townships in Arizona were measured from, sort of like the origin on an x-y graphing system. The x-axis is often called the “Base Line”. Baseline Road is the actual Base Line of the Arizona Public Lands Survey! The y-axis is called the Meridian. I’m not entirely sure what street lines up with it these days, but it’s roughly in Avondale, west Phoenix, Glendale, Lake Pleasant, etc. In Arizona, this Meridian is officially known as the “Gila and Salt River Meridian”. I think – I am not sure – that it was set at the confluence of the two rivers. Okay, so the rest of the world is metric. Well, so is the United States. We perform all science in metric as well as anything that needs to conform to international standards. But as far as insisting that day-to-day common measurement be converted to metric, the government has backed off that plan for various reasons, the main one being cost. For simple casual use, miles, pounds, acres and the so-called USCS measures all work fine. I used to live in Australia, which uses metric officially, but noticed that everyone still used miles, inches and ‘stones’ when talking casually. I got used to the metric system real fast – it’s pretty easy, really – but it was interesting to note that after about 30 years when Australia became nominally metric, they still held on to the old systems for every day use. A ‘stone’, by the way, is 14 pounds. And it’s always singular, like “He weighs 12 stone” (168 lbs). It
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