In 1793, Thomas Jefferson requested equipment from France that could be used to evaluate the metric system within the United States, Joseph Dombey returned from France with a standard kilogram. Before reaching the United States, Dombey’s ship was blown off course by a storm and captured by pirates, and he died in captivity on Montserrat.
The amount of metrication is about 3.4 barrels wide, 2 thumbs heigh and 6.31 american freedom tires
I’m doing my part! And yeah everyone hates that I do it
In the U.S., the SI system is used extensively in fields such as science, medicine, electronics, the military, automobile production and repair, and international affairs. The US uses metric in money (100 cents), photography (35 mm film, 50 mm lens), medicine (1 cc of drug), nutrition labels (grams of fat), bottles of soft drink (liter), and volume displacement in engines (liters). In 3 domains, cooking/baking, distance, and temperature, customary units are used more often than metric units. Also, the scientific and medical communities use metric units almost exclusively as does NASA. All Aircraft and Air traffic control use Celsius temperature (only) at all US airports and while in flight. Post-1994 federal law also mandates most packaged consumer goods be labeled in both customary and metric units.
The U.S. has fully adopted the SI unit for time, the second. The U.S. has a national policy to adopt the metric system. All U.S. agencies are required to adopt the metric system.
Military is the big one. It’s where i learned metric. Helped me a ton went i moved overseas.
I used to have this great map from Australia in the 1970’s when they were converting. It was a world map depicting “countries using the metric system, countries adopting the metric system, countries with no plans to adopt”. The only " fuck it, let’s stay with Rods to the Hogshead " country was the U. S.
It pleases me that the foot and pound are officially just metric derivatives. I wish we used metric here, but as others have said I don’t think it’s going to happen. I have a machine shop full of US standard metrology equipment and it would be ruinously expensive for me to replace it with metric stuff. At least precision machining doesn’t use fractions for the most part which is nice. Everything is in inches or tenths, hundredths, or thousandths (aka “thou”) of an inch.
If there was ever a switch it wouldn’t need to be switch out all at once it would just be newer equipment would slowly be rolled in. It wouldn’t be like Canada where we use mix of imperial and metic.
I don’t think metric will ever overtake customary units for distance in common usage in the US. The length of an inch, foot, and mile are burned into our public consciousness. Products come standard at discrete lengths defined in feet, like lumber being sold in lengths of 8, 10, or 12 feet. Our entire infrastructure is built around these lengths. Cars have both mph and kph on their speedometers, but no one ever looks at the kph. We’d have to change every speed limit sign in the whole country, as well as every highway mile marker and all the distance signs.
I feel like in the US we already encounter Celsius on a regular basis though, and it would be easier to drop Farenheit if we wanted to.
hey can you pick up a 2 liter bottle of pop on the way home? Thanks.
All other countries who adopted metric faced the exact same problem and managed to solve it. The US isn’t unique or exceptional with regards to this in any way.
Yeah the costs to transition faced by the US today and 1850s Europe are different. Also you seem to have missed the part where here in the US we already use metric for a ton of stuff, I was just talking about how our infrastructure is built around customary units for distance. Why so mad bro?
We change bit by bit, industry by industry, and disaster by disaster here.
Which is probably why they should have made the change over 50 years ago because as time rolls on it becomes exponentially more impossible to achieve.
