New Zealand's 'Little Miss Metric'

It's 150 years this week since the Metre Convention was signed. Also known as the Treaty of the Metre, it ushered in the metric system.

New Zealand started the transition to metric in 1969 and was fully metric by December 1976.

Almost every country in the world, except the US, Myanmar and Liberia, now uses the metric system.

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Jeannie Preddey is thought to be the first baby in New Zealand whose weight was announced in kilograms, rather than pounds.

And she became a mascot of sorts - dubbed ‘Little Miss Metric’, every birthday until she was ten (of course) she was given a metric birthday party by the New Zealand Metric Advisory Board.

Her earliest memories are of being taken to parliament as a toddler, she told RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

“Having to sit on MPs’ laps and endless photographs, not really understanding it until I went to school, and then [my teacher] Sally Barrett made it very easy for me to enjoy being Little Miss Metric.”

Barrett was a senior teacher at the Wadestown School Preddey attended, and got on board with the metric mission and its young mascot.

“With her enthusiasm the Metric Advisory Board adopted my class, and then my school, and then the wider Wadestown school.”

Preddey, born in 1970, was a small baby, weighing in at 3.17 kilos.

“And to the people that don't understand what that means in terms of pounds of butter, about seven pounds,” she says.

Miss Metric was bounced on many a politician’s knee during her first ten years, she says.

“I don't know if I sat on our Prime Minister's knee, usually a cabinet minister. There was a different one every year.”