BoomerZoo Almanac for October 21-27, 2007: Waves of the future
The original meter was invented by the French in the 1780s, and it’s been regularly made a more precise measurement, most recently at the CGPM (Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures or, in English, the General Conference on Weights & Measures) on October 21, 1983, where it was defined in terms of the speed of light as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
Not that it makes much difference to the vast majority of us Boomers, or any other American, for that matter. We’d much rather cling to our traditional inches, feet and yards than kowtow to those French (and just about everyone else in the world) by changing to the metric system of measurements.
And here’s the reason given by a huge number of people I’ve asked: It’s too hard to figure out how long a meter is, how heavy a kilo is, how many liters of gas it will take to fill a gas tank (and here’s the kicker) compared to yards, pounds and gallons! And here’s my answer to that: WHAT? It’s just however many meters, kilos or liters it is, and you don’t have to convert it in your head. Just get used to the metrics! Having lived in a “developing” nation that has already somehow figured out how to convert its local measurements to metric, I can honestly say that they are a LOT easier to use. Everything is based on 10s (rather than 12s, for heaven’s sake!), so addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are all a lot easier. Think about it.
While we didn’t much care what kind of waves were used to define the meter, we sure got behind another kind of wave, that being the microwave.
It was in 1955 that Raytheon’s homestyle microwave hit the U.S. market with Tappan as its distributor. Raytheon had come up with a commercial model in 1947, a refrigerator-sized unit costing between $2,000 and $3,000. Tappan’s home model was more the size of a conventional oven, but had a less powerful microwave generating system. It had two cooking speeds (500 or 800 watts), stainless steel exterior, glass shelf, top browning element and a recipe card drawer. Still, at $1300 a pop, it wasn’t snapped up too quickly.
Even when the prices finally came down, my husband refused to buy one, citing questions about those “unmonitored microwaves.” In reality, the FDA had set safety standards for the darn things in the early 1970s. So, the only way I got a microwave oven was to buy one for myself as a Mother’s Day present sometime in the late 1980s. My husband loves it, though he keeps his distance and insists that our sons do so as well. Ongoing research leads me to believe he’s hit on a pretty wise policy—but don’t tell him I said so!
