WQPH Correction I Sent And Reply From Lowell Sun

[Don]

> <<On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:02:29 -0400, A Joseph Ross <joe@attorneyross.com>
> said:
>
>> Last I
>> heard, Jimmy Carter started a program to convert the US to the metric
>> system, but Reagan killed it.

I remember broadcasters were supposed to do this metric conversion process
with temperature over 3 years.

1st year(1977?):  Adding the celsius number after the farenheit number.

i.e....."...54 degrees in Boston, that's 12 celsius, I'm Don Batting WBZ
news..."

So far so good?  No one had problems with that...and it started to get the
country accustomed to hearing the comparable celsius temperature.


The following year (1978?) broadcasters were supposed to flip the
two...stating the celsius first....THEN the farenheit.

i.e....."....It's 10 degrees in Boston, that's 50 degrees Farenheit, I'm
Dareel Gould, WBZ News..."

The first few days of the new year, WBZ and others that attemtped this were
flooded with complaints!  ("Whaddya mean it's TEN degrees?") I don't think
it went much byond a week into the new year before some stations flipped
back to the Farenheit first then celsius...and some stations dropped the
celsius altogether.

(The 3rd year plan (1979?) was to drop Farenheit altogether.....but we never
got that far.)

By the time Reagan got in in 1980, it was obvious the American people had
given every indication they were not interested in going through this
transition in the supermarket, gas pump, weather reports, etc.  The American
National Metric Council was later disbanded.