In an era of global markets, even a dog can use a universally understood brand name. One Canadian mutt in need of a bilingual name – so it would stand to attention, stop chewing the newspapers or cease gorging on passing infants when addressed in either of Canada’s two official languages – wound up with ‘Kilo’. It’s a moniker that’s perfectly at home in Her Majesty’s more metric North American Dominion.
When the beast moved south and took to cavorting in New York parks, Kilo’s owners realized two things. One was that the revolted colonies still clung atavistically to imperial measures; the second was that only one commodity in New York is traded in grams and kilos. It is a white powder and it is not used to sweeten coffee. However, running round a Manhattan park insouciantly advertising illegal substances is as nothing to the possible consequences of metrical mayhem.
That was shown somewhat drastically this September when the Mars Climate Orbiter, after voyaging lonely years through hundreds of millions of kilometers of dark space, plunged to its doom on the red planet. Doubtless the last output of its guidance computer was the binary equivalent of ‘Merde!’ when it discovered that it should have been eating up miles instead of meters. The steering rockets on the vessel were calibrated in pounds and feet, while the main computer had the good sense to work in kilograms and meters. ‘Human error,’ that well known recidivist culprit, had failed to do the conversions.
It is strange to think that there is a little rust-smeared piece of Martian desert that is forever, in a metrically metaphysical sense, a piece of England: a $125 mn monument to the continued American use of feet, yards, furlongs, ounces and pounds, despite the fact that the mother country herself has aborted them to work on the metric system.
Henry Ford claimed that ‘history is bunk.’ It is actually a recital of serial and monumental vertical fornications, in which few if any of the consequences are predicted and even fewer plans work out satisfactorily. Consider railways. Most of the world’s iron horses gallop along distinctly un-metric tracks which are set a fossilized four feet eight and half inches apart.
The most persistent legend is that the standard width of railways began with the Romans who built the gates on Hadrian’s Wall some five feet wide. So the natives in the North of England for centuries afterwards built their wagons to scale. When George Stephenson built the first railways not too far from the old wall, he made the track four feet eight inches wide so it would fit the wagons. When he came to build the first modern railway between Liverpool and Manchester, for unrecorded reasons, he added an extra half inch for luck, and that became the standard for the rest of the world.
In that great Victorian age of globalization, the railway gauges reflected the power of Anglo-Saxon engineering and the local responses to it. The Russians chose five feet and the Spanish five feet six inch gauges to keep out competition – and invaders. The Japanese adopted three foot six inches for some of their lines. Ironically, the only place where I ever came across meter gauge lines was in India, built by some eccentric, probably Scottish engineer, doubtless cavorting with mad shaggy dogs called Kilo in the midday sun.
We have had modern equivalents of course. Think of IBM and Microsoft’s collaboration in establishing the standard-gauge personal computer. Every day, as their computers freeze or crash, millions of users pay honor to Bill Gates, his 640K Ram operating system and the big, clunky, unstable, but standard set of software that has been built on it. Each upgrade comes with its own new bugs. It is as if Ford had tried to capitalize on the inflammatory properties of the Pinto gas tank by selling expensive fire extinguishers and asbestos upholstery to previous purchasers, and then followed up with offers of respirator systems to check asbestosis.
Once you have built a railroad you expect it to last a century or two, and Amtrak has had many happy decades of use out of its rolling stock. But we all know that the minute the cash register rings in your friendly neighborhood electronics store, your personal computer is obsolescent and depreciating. Microsoft has been doing very well out of the constant churning of hardware and software.
Frustrated computer users are pinning their hopes on Linux, the free operating software which is the equivalent of traveling on a train whose axles will adapt to all gauges of track, from meter to broad gauge. Or rather the operating system is the equivalent of tracks that flex to fit whatever size of train is running on them.
Who knows? Linus Torvald, the Finn who invented Linux, may have been inspired by Finnish Railways which still runs on the five foot gauge it inherited from the Tsar, although the Baltic possibly poses a larger obstacle to Finnish trains to western Europe than any change of track.
However, to get back on track, Linux, which is subversively free, and similar programs based on it, bring out the pirate that lurks in all of us. After all, it stretches morality to pay hundreds and thousands of dollars to Bill Gates for a CD-Rom. For all this talk of the knowledge-based economy, most people like some mass for their cash – and they want it to work. A knowledge-based economy is by its very nature intolerant of monopolies, especially unpopular ones; so the constant upgrading and churning could put Microsoft in memory lane with Atari yet.
The Speculator
