American Weights and Measures

The colonists who came from England, carrying with them to North America their language, religious beliefs, and culture, also brought their system of weights and measures. This system had developed in an organic, unregulated fashion for centuries, some of the units and their names dating from before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Examples included the rod (16½ feet), furlong (40 rods), and acre (160 square rods). By the time of the first settlements in the early seventeenth century, the system of length measures had become stable and well-defined for the purposes of commerce, with its units close to those used four hundred years later. The official English standard yard bar made in 1588, for example, is only 0.01 inch shorter than the yard of the twenty-first century.

The statute mile of 5,280 feet was so defined in England in 1593 and seems to have been adopted readily in the colonies. Two parallel systems of weight were brought over. Troy weight, the older one, was used only for gold and silver and, with somewhat different subdivisions (apothecaries’ weight), for drugs. For all other commodities, the avoirdupois system came into wide use in the fourteenth century and remains the customary system. Like the length units, the weight units were relatively stable and well-defined, both the colonial and the U.S. standards being in principle based on official standards of the English exchequer until 1893.

The system of capacity in England was less orderly. There were several gallons and bushels, originating from old statutes that defined them with insufficient precision or clarity. The legal definitions often did not agree with the measures actually in use, and it was difficult to make the latter with sufficient accuracy. There was confusion between dry measure and liquid measure. Furthermore, in the case of dry measure, a bushel of wheat, for example, might in some cases be measured heaped and in others “struck” (with a flat upper surface).

The individual colonies generally adopted as the legal standard for liquid measure the Queen Anne wine gallon, defined by British law in 1706 as 231 cubic inches. The beer gallon (282 cubic inches) was used concurrently, but it seems to have gradually yielded to the wine gallon and by 1821 was going out of use. For dry measure, the usual unit was the Winchester bushel (legally defined in 1696–1697) of 2,150.42 cubic inches (the contents of a cylinder 18½ inches in diameter and 8 inches deep). But there were anomalies.

Connecticut, until 1850, maintained its legal bushel equivalent to 2,198 cubic inches. Kentucky’s was in 1798 defined to be 2,1502⁄3 cubic inches. By the mid-eighteenth century the individual colonies had laws making the exchequer standards their own. They had acquired official copies of them, and had ordered their counties and towns to obtain their own copies for testing the weights and measures of merchants. Although there is no evidence of conflict or dissatisfaction with these provisions, as soon as the colonies united, the Articles of Confederation transferred to the national government “the sole and exclusive right and power of . . . fixing the standard of weights and measures throughout the United States.” The Constitution likewise gave Congress the power to “fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”

Jefferson’s proposals. The new nation promptly adopted an innovative decimal money system worked out by Thomas Jefferson, but the federal government hesitated in dealing with weights and measures. At its request, Jefferson in 1790 developed two proposals “for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage, Weights, and Measures” of the nation. The first was to define the foot already in use in terms of the length of a special pendulum; fix the gallon arbitrarily at 270 cubic inches, with all the other capacity units to correspond; and define the ounce as the weight of one-thousandth that of a cubic foot of water. Except for the abolition of troy weight and the adjustment of the capacity measures, this plan in practice would have involved minimal change.

Jefferson’s more radical second plan was to extend the decimal principle that had already been successful in the coinage. All the units, would be changed, although they would retain the names of the closest old ones. (See sidebar.) The new foot, for example, one-fifth the length of Jefferson’s pendulum, would be 0.978728 old feet, and the new inch, one-tenth of the foot, would be 1.174 old inches. A few new terms would be introduced, such as the “decad” (10 feet), the “metre” (1 cubic inch), and the “kental” (100 pounds). By a very slight adjustment in the silver content of the dollar, Jefferson was able to make his system combine elegantly with the existing decimal money system, so the dollar coin would weigh exactly one new ounce.

Congress adopted neither proposal, setting a pattern of reluctance to exert its power to fix weights and measures that has continued ever since. One reason, no doubt, was that France at this very time was developing the metric system and in Great Britain, too, reforms were being discussed. American legislators waited to see the results. The metric system progressed slowly and was adopted by few other countries, and the British did nothing. For a quartercentury after Jefferson’s report, the American states awaited action by Congress, but in the meantime they passed their own laws, mostly setting standards for the size of barrels. In 1814 Louisiana abolished its old French measures and adopted the English ones; six years later, though, the transition was still incomplete.

Up to this time the government had been concerned with weights and measures exclusively in their relation to trade and commerce. But when Ferdinand Hassler was sent to Europe in 1811 to buy precision instruments for the geodetic operations of the Survey of the Coast, scientific considerations became significant. Hassler obtained accurate copies of the British yard and the meter, and one of his meter bars became the de facto standard of the Coast Survey, not being supplanted until 1890. John Quincy Adams’s report. In 1817 the Senate and in 1819 the House asked Secretary of State John Quincy Adams to prepare “a plan for fixing the standard of weights and measures.” After a thorough and thoughtful investigation that duly appraised the advantages of the metric system, Adams in 1821 recommended even less change than Jefferson’s  conservative plan. The government, Adams declared, should specify the standard of length to agree with the British one, define the avoirdupois pound according to the existing relation that thirty-two cubic feet of water weigh two thousand pounds, keep the corresponding troy weights, and keep the existing wine and ale gallons and bushel.

But Adams went beyond Jefferson in several important respects. He recommended that physical standards of the units be made and that official copies be distributed to the states. The government should consult with foreign governments to work toward a universal system and correlate the meter to the foot, he suggested. Finally, Adams collected data showing that the standards used in the customhouses varied significantly from each other.

Government response. For several years, Congress failed to act on Adams’s straightforward suggestions. The Treasury, however, concerned about the standard of weight for coinage, obtained a certified copy of the British troy pound, and in 1828 an act of Congress made it the official standard for the U.S. Mint. This was the first true exercise of Congress’s power to fix standards and a sign that the legislators were at long last ready to grapple with the entire problem. Disturbed by the evidence of discrepancies in the customhouse standards such as had been revealed by Adams, the Senate in 1830 ordered an investigation. Hassler was called in to carry it out. He duly reported embarrassing irregularities and, with the  support of the Treasury department, began working energetically to correct the situation. Hassler’s efforts—resulting in the establishment in 1836 of the Office of Weights and Measures, the fixing of standards based on those he had brought from Europe, and the dissemination of accurate secondary standards to the customhouses and states—marked the beginning of a new era in the story of the weights and measures of the United States.

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