You get up in the morning and head into the bathroom. You’d like to know how many pounds you gained after Thanksgiving dinner, but you can’t because there’s no floor scale. You’re happy about this; because you’re sure you gained a few.

You head downstairs and measure out enough from the bag of ground coffee to make your morning pot. You don’t realize it, but you overpaid wildly for the ground coffee beans. Since the ground beans were not weighed beforehand, the grocer just ground up a large scoopful (about .89 of a pound ) and asked you for $11.99, which is the going price for a pound of that particular bean.

You head for work at the pharmacy. You wish there was a way to count the pills other than by hand, which is a time-wasting process. If you had a pill counter that counted by weight, you’d have an easier time of it. But, alas, you don’t.

As you drive home from work, a trailer rig on the highway ahead of you suffers from several bursting tires, and you narrowly avoid being caught in the wreck. The tires burst because the truck was overloaded. The truck was overloaded because the weight of the cargo was unknown.

You return to your apartment and kick your feet up after an exhausting day. As you do, the building you live in starts to collapse. The concrete that your building was made from was mixed improperly, because the ingredients that went into it were not weighed, and so the proportions were wrong, making weak concrete. Sorry.

All of these silly scenarios are contingent on the idea that we, as a civilization, would even have made it this far without the ability to accurately weigh things. In fact, we would all be living much different (read: worse) lives if this was the case. The Industrial Revolution would have been impossible if the French had not come up with a universal standard of weighing in 1799. General purpose, precision scales and lab balances server our lives very single day in thousands of applications.