A Metric America

The intriguing tale of why the United States has never adopted the metric system, and what that says about us. The American standard system of measurement is a unique and odd thing to behold with its esoteric, inconsistent standards: twelve inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, sixteen ounces in a pound, one hundred pennies to the dollar. For something as elemental as counting and estimating the world around us, it seems like a confusing tool to use. So how did we end up with it? Most of the rest of the world is on the metric system, and for a time in the 1970s America appeared ready to make the switch. Yet it never happened, and the reasons for that get to the root of who we think we are, just as the measurements are woven into the ways we think. John Marciano chronicles the origins of measurement systems, the kaleidoscopic array of standards throughout Europe and the thirteen American colonies, the combination of intellect and circumstance that resulted in the metric system's creation in France in the wake of the French Revolution, and America's stubborn adherence to the hybrid United States Customary System ever since. As much as it is a tale of quarters and tenths, it is a human drama, replete with great inventors, visionary presidents, obsessive activists, and science-loving technocrats. Anyone who reads this inquisitive, engaging story will never read Robert Frost's line “miles to go before I sleep” or eat a foot-long sub again without wondering, Whatever happened to the metric system?

Excerpt from A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come In 1821 Adams did give serious attention to the metric system as an alternative for adoption. Yet, although he believed it approached the ideal perfection of uniformity applied to weights and measures, he rejected it because he felt that the time was not right for it. Most of our trade was with inch-pound England, and the metric system was not even firmly established in France, let alone the rest of the world. Better to wait, he pointed out, until a uniform international measurement system could be worked out. Adams' conditions have now been met: the world has committed itself to the metric system, and even in the United States its use is increasing. For America, it is a decision whose time has come. Three years ago the Congress asked for a sweeping investigation of the metric question (see inside front cover), because it sensed that the world trend toward metric called for a new assessment. The investigation progressed over a dozen different avenues involving public hearings, supplemented by surveys on international trade, business and industry, education, national security - almost every activity in our society. This volume evaluates and distills all of that, and also covers what has been learned from the British, who are just past the midpoint of their metric changeover period; the Australians, who are beginning theirs; the Canadians, who have decided to go metric, too; the Japanese, who finished conversion ten years ago; and the thousands of individuals who spoke and corresponded with us during the course of the u.s. Metric Study. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.