One Nation's Tuck Is Another's Drag

When it comes to common measurements, just about all the world has been able to agree on so far is the 60-minute hour and the earth's longitudes and latitudes. The search for standardization, which grows more vital to national industries as the world grows smaller, has been frustrated by interminable discussions about inches v. centimeters, dollars v. pounds, and Fahrenheit degrees v. Celsius. A recent meeting of 35 nations in New Delhi to study standards spent the entire session before agreeing just to standardize the metric screw --a process that will take many years.

Even among nations that use the same weights and linear measures, agreements on standardization are still difficult. Perhaps the most bizarre search for a common standard was started in Strasbourg, France, by a panel of Common Market experts who are facing a sweet problem: how much chocolate should go into a common chocolate bar.

The result might be called the Eurobar.

The Two-Faced Scale. The chocolate bar situation, which is highly important to Europe's huge chocolate makers (Nestle, Stollwerck, Droste), arose because each of the Common Six differs in the weight and size of its candy, and each wants imported chocolate to follow local regulation. But it is only one bite from a batch of standardization problems that has been stirred up by the increase in Common Market trade. The Six have decided, after two years of negotiation, on 38 tons as the maximum weight for a long-haul truck, but they still have not stipulated how this weight should" be distributed over each axle. Five of the six prefer 13-ton limits per axle, but the Dutch, because of their soggy, shifting subsoil, demand a lighter weight of ten tons. Similarly, in designing a common farm tractor, the Dutch want safety features to prevent the tractor from toppling backward as it pulls attachments through their heavy-clay lowland soil. The French want a tractor engineered not to topple sideways on the hills, where much French farming is done.

Most difficulties, however, are due to simple bureaucracy. The Belgian license plate is too large for the plate holder of the small Italian Fiat 600, and Belgian importers must jerry-build other arrangements. Belgium's single-faced grocery scales, on the other hand, are so far illegal in Germany, where the law requires two-faced scales for merchant and customer. German automobiles must be fitted with yellow headlights when they are exported to France, but the French must put white headlights on their own cars before exporting them. One of the most complicated problems is that of standardizing electrical equipment, a task that some experts say will take 20 years.

Blanket Solution. For all that, no product has so far provoked as many uneasy stirrings in the Common Market as the ordinary blanket. When they sleep, the French like to tuck in their blankets, and they thus require a wider blanket than the citizens of other nations. The Germans, on the other hand, sleep with covers untucked, and the much larger blankets liked by the French irritate them by dragging on the floor. The blanket business is by no means Europe's biggest, but it clearly will have to come up with a physiological solution agreeable to all--perhaps a stretch blanket--before it can expect to profit by the lowering of trade barriers.

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