Weights and Measures

Weighing Your Purchases: How New Laws May Help You Become a Savvier Online Shopper

March 1, 2024

When you buy something by weight or volume, you want to get what you pay for. And we’re helping to make sure that happens — whether you shop online or in a

4 Places Weights and Measures Help You Get What You Pay For

March 1, 2023

Here at NIST, we are committed to making sure you get what you pay for when buying something based on weight or measure, such as food or fuel.

U.S. Weights and Measures Week: Measuring Up to the New Normal

March 4, 2021

Each year during national Weights and Measures Week (March 1 to 7), we celebrate the contributions made by the weights and measures community to ensure accuracy

Charging Ahead: Weights and Measures Week 2020

March 3, 2020

Happy Weights and Measures Week 2020! Weights and Measures Week is celebrated every year from March 1-7 to commemorate President John Adams signing the first U

The Vara: A Standard of Length With a Not-So-Standard History

October 11, 2019

By the 1850s, the United States had annexed nearly all of what are now its southwestern states from Mexico, and with the region, its peoples. Though the U.S

The Case for Building Beautiful Instruments

March 26, 2019

I discovered my affinity for attractive instruments while working a job previous to my coming to NIST. My boss then had a love affair with the common hose clamp

black and white photo of a 1920s weights and measures inspector checking the accuracy of a grocery store scale using test weights

Back to Basics: Weights and Measures Week 2018

March 7, 2018

Happy Weights and Measures Week 2018! What’s “Weights and Measures Week,” you might ask? That’s the week set aside every year to commemorate the signing of the

Pirates of the Caribbean (Metric Edition)

September 19, 2017

To save his own life, Joseph Dombey had an idea. As two pirate ships surrounded the ship he was on in the Caribbean Sea in 1794, Dombey scrambled below deck

Teaching Metrology Abroad as a Fulbright Specialist

March 8, 2017

It seems that I have been a teacher nearly my entire life. One of my first jobs as an early teen was helping to teach gymnastics to elementary students. Before

Measuring Up to the Task

March 3, 2017

Even though I have spent my entire professional career at NIST, until a year ago it would never have entered my mind that I would become the chief of the NIST

The Unit Price is Right

March 1, 2017

Believe it or not, I love to grocery shop. Besides getting to pick all my favorite foods, I love the challenge of getting the best deals—and a challenge it can

Elizabeth Gentry holding a kilogram test weight in the weights and measures training lab

Busting Myths about the Metric System

October 6, 2020

This year will be the 45th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, which was signed on December 23, 1975, by President Gerald R. Ford. Normally, we celebrate

Blonde woman in white lab coat working on equipment

Weighing My Career as a Metrologist

March 7, 2016

As happens with most every metrologist I know, I fell into metrology (the science of measurement) quite by accident. My degree was in chemical engineering, and

Happy Weights and Measures Week 2016!

March 1, 2016

Like many of you, I venture out on Saturday mornings to get groceries and gas. Until my college years, I never thought much about whether or not I paid the

Taking Measure