The great danger of the metric system

First published 15 September 2020 @ low-throughput

A few fact(oid)s about Dame Agatha Christie I haven’t been aware until now.

• Pharmacy and toxicology were among Christie’s many interests. During the the First World War, she took some time off her work as a nurse to study for the Apothecaries Hall Examination. She wrote in her autobiography:

  To be introduced suddenly to the periodic table, atomic weight, and the ramifications of coal-tar derivatives was apt to result in bewilderment. However, I found my feet, mastered the simpler facts, and after we had blown up our Cona coffee machine in the process of practising Marsh’s test for arsenic our progress was well on the way. <...>

  A chemist’s shop, the first time that you go behind the scenes, is a revelation. Being amateurs in our hospital work, we measured every bottle of medicine with the utmost accuracy. When the doctor prescribed twenty grains of bismuth carbonate to a dose, exactly twenty grains the patient got. Since we were amateurs, I think this was a good thing, but I imagine that any chemist who has done his five years, and got his minor pharmaceutical degree, knows his stuff in the same way as a good cook knows hers. He tosses in portions from the various stock bottles with the utmost confidence, without bothering to measure or weigh at all. He measures his poisons or dangerous drugs carefully, of course, but the harmless stuff goes in in the approximate dollops. Colouring and flavouring are added in much the same way. This sometimes results in the patients coming back and complaining that their medicine is a different colour from last time. <...>

  During the course of my pharmaceutical instruction on Sunday afternoons, I was faced with a problem. It was incumbent upon the entrants to the examination to deal with both the ordinary system and the metric system of measurements. My pharmacist gave me practice in making up preparations to the metric formula. Neither doctors nor chemists like the metrical system in operation. One of our doctors at the hospital never learned what ‘containing 0.1’ really meant, and would say, ‘Now let me see, is this solution one in a hundred or one in a thousand?’ The great danger of the metric system is that if you go wrong you go ten times wrong. <...>

  It was while I was working in the dispensary that I first conceived the idea of writing a detective story.

• It was not until 1920 that her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, saw the light of day. The corresponding episode of Poirot was released 30 years ago on occasion of Christie’s 100^th birthday. Now, to mark the centenary of Styles, the Royal Mint issued the new £2 coins featuring the author’s signature, a jigsaw puzzle and some instruments of murder.
  

• I visited Ayuntamiento de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on many a bureaucracy-related occasion without knowing that its (pretty ugly) headquarters occupy the place of the former Quiney’s Hotel Metropole where Agatha Christie stayed in 1927.

  Las Palmas is still my ideal of the place to go in the winter months. I believe nowadays it is a tourist resort and has lost its early charm. Then it was quiet and peaceful. Very few people came there except those who stayed for a month or two in winter and preferred it to Madeira. It had two perfect beaches. The temperature was perfect too: the average was about 70, which is, to my mind, what a summer temperature should be.

  Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
  

• The Mousetrap was not only the longest-running West End show but it had the longest initial run of any play in history. It premiered in 1952 and ran continuously until March 2020 until it was rudely interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.