Page 4


www.us-tech.com


Tech-Op-ed March, 2018 SOUNDING OFF


By Michael Skinner Editor


How Pirates Commandeered America’s Metric System


T


he metric system with its powers of 10 makes complete sense for meas- urements. Washington and Jefferson certainly thought so, but thanks to some Caribbean pirates, America’s original route to the metric system


was shunted off onto an unused railroad siding, and then the connecting rail- road tracks were torn up. George Washington even spoke about standardizing a system of weights and measures in the first State of the Union address. Yet now, nearly 250 years later, we are still hampered by an unwieldy set of meas- urements inherited from the British, while ironically, the U.K. uses the met- ric system. Toward the end of the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson, who served as the


the first Secretary of State, desired closer economic ties with France. After all, France had supplied the warships and troops that had made a great difference during the American Revolution. Also, since Jefferson was an avid amateur scientist, he became a great admirer of France’s scientific ideas. Jefferson was attempting to convince Congress to formally adopt the new standards of meas- urement, but couldn’t gather support without a scientist to back him up. So, with the blessings of the French government, botanist Joseph


Dombey set sail with a rod that measured exactly one meter and a small cop- per cylinder, called a “grave,” about three inches tall and three inches around, with a small handle on top. This object weighed exactly one kilogram. Dombey was voyaging to America to meet Jefferson in Philadelphia, appear before Congress and convince the burgeoning United States to adopt what would soon be known as the metric system. One fateful day in 1794, as Jefferson waited patiently stateside,


Dombey’s ship was thrown off course by an enormous storm that blew him far south to the Caribbean. There, his ship was attacked by British-backed priva- teers, essentially waterborne, state-sponsored terrorists. Dombey attempted to pass off as Spanish and was imprisoned on the island of Montserrat, where he died in captivity. The pirates had hoped to obtain a ransom for Dombey, but with that plan foiled, the contents of his ship were auctioned off. By the time another emissary from France was able to make it to


Philadelphia, the Secretary of State was no longer Jefferson, but Edmund Randolph, who didn’t particularly care about the metric system. Dombey’s kilogram eventually came into the possession of Andrew Elli-


cott, an American land surveyor, who passed it down through his family until it was given to the agency that preceded the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Despite being a global superpower, and being deeply connected with sci-


ence and technology around the world, the United States is one of only seven nations that has not completely adopted the use of the metric system. This has not been for lack of trying, however. In 1893, the Mendenhall Order officially made the metric system the standard for weights and measures in the U.S., defining pounds and yards in metric terms. Since then, progress has been ab- surdly slow. The British influence has proved difficult to shake. In 1975, Pres- ident Gerald Ford signed a law that declared the metric system “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce.” Note the emphasis on “preferred.” The problem seems to be mainly with how we think. We are used to the


hodgepodge of English and SI units that we see every day. We buy pounds of meat, but liters of soda. We even combine them, calculating electrical resist- ance in ohms (SI) per thousand feet (English). “Few people have any adequate conception of the amount of unnecessary


labor involved in the use of our present weights and measures,” said Alexan- der Graham Bell in 1906. He was right, and he probably wasn’t imagining how complex it would become. I remember being shifted to the metric system in high school chemistry and physics classes, where we expressly measured all quantities in metric. It’s not a difficult mental change to start thinking about things in metric, but to implement it in everyday life would be costly. Prod- ucts and packages, speedometers, spec sheets, street signs, etc., the old Eng- lish system is deeply ingrained. While Dombey didn’t live to see his kilogram make it to the U.S, where


the one that is believed to be his resides at the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland, his mission to evangelize the metric system has never completely ended. If not for those pirates, we might not be having to advance to metric at home, millimeter by millimeter. r


PUBLISHER’S NOTE


By Jacob Fattal Publisher


APEX Sets the Tone for 2018


the world. As you can see from our massive, 136-page March issue, APEX 2018 is likely to be one of the best yet. The mood in the industry has noticeably lightened over the past year,


I


with more innovation demanding more jobs in the U.S., and with the great strides made in automation and intelligent software enabling even small manufacturers to compete globally. Almost every company at APEX will be exhibiting some form of automa-


tion, from assembly to test and inspection, while the more ambitious will be focused on demonstrating their machine-to-machine (M2M) communication capabilities. Automation is also growing more modular and more flexible. Cobots, collaborative robots, can be as simple as a single robotic arm mount- ed on a platform that can be wheeled around the factory and reprogrammed by movement-based teaching. PCB assembly equipment itself is taking a modular and combinatory


turn. Especially useful for low-volume, high-mix manufacturers, pick-and- place systems are now being combined with dispensing platforms, dispensing platforms with automated inspection, and coating and curing systems inte- grated into one machine. Up and down the line, new software systems are quietly gathering and


organizing massive amounts of data, collating it and recommending optimiza- tions. The more powerful versions of these systems automatically adjust pa- rameters between printer and pick-and-place through the use of inspection, or tweaking reflow variables to accommodate the next product. The more the line becomes hands-off, the closer we get toward “lights-out” manufacturing: an SMT facility that requires no human intervention for normal operation and churns out product 24 hours a day, seven days a week. These are broad industry trends, to be sure. Edging over the competition in-


crementally offers the most clear cost-benefit ratio, which means that the indus- try as a whole lumbers on together. This constant struggle is the heart of inno- vation, but is kept in balance by our need to collaborate with each other. No in- dividual can succeed on his or her own, as no company can. Very often, we can push each other to greater achievement than we can push ourselves. r


PC APEX looms as the staple trade show that sets a tone for the electron- ics manufacturing industry for the coming year. Held in balmy San Diego, APEX is one of the most concentrated electronics assembly trade shows in


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136