Cheddar's YouTube comments are full of people asking: What's wrong with you?
Why are these people so self centered?
Go metric already, what are you waiting for?
The reason Americans don't use the metric system is a saga spanning over 200 years,
with a twist ending.
Technically, America is a metric country,
Americans just don't know it.
Our saga begins during the French Revolution,
the goal of which was to overthrow the French monarchy,
and bring about a more enlightened and rational society.
That included replacing Idiosyncratic,
traditional measurements with a decimal based system.
The metric system standardized everything,
and made commerce, trade,
and collecting taxes easier.
During this time, the United States was ripe for metrication,
Francophile Thomas Jefferson was secretary of state,
and enlightenment sympathetic George Washington was the President.
Jefferson championed decimal based system of weights and measures,
and was hoping to convert the US to just such a system.
In 1793, France sent botanist and aristocrat, Joseph Dombi ,
where a metre long rod and a one kilogram copper cylinder,
to demonstrate the system for Jefferson in the US.
But his ship was blown off course by a storm,
he was captured by British privateers,
who looted his stuff and tossed him in prison, where he died.
Congress wasn't ready to act on metric just yet.
It wasn't clear, if the metric system would even survive in France,
thanks to political upheavals and fallout from Napoleon's rise and fall.
Besides, our main trading partner,
great Britain, still used inches and pound.
By the middle of the 1800's,
the French were really promoting the metric system,
with an eye toward making international trade more efficient and profitable.
So, in 1875, United States was one of 17 signatories to the Treaty of the Meter.
We might have signed the treaty,
but there was no way we were switching to metric.
This came right after America's massive industrial buildup and westward expansion.
We'd just built a lot of infrastructure,
powerful industrialists blocked attempts at metricating.
They argued that the cost of replacing all of
their equipment would be prohibitively expensive,
and if they were forced to convert,
it would damage American industry.
Still, the US Government kept quietly inching towards metric,
officially recognizing the meter and the kilogram
as the fundamental standards of length and mass.
So, technically, our yard, our pound,
our inch have all been officially defined relative to the meter, and the kilogram.
By the mid 1900's,
the metric system really took off,
as the world's economies became more globalized.
The UK metricated in 1965 so
that they could do more trade with the European Common Market,
and the United States was part of this general trend towards metric.
In 1971, Congress published a report not so subtly titled,
A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come,
which recommended the US go metric,
within the next 10 years.
But by the time the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 hit President Gerald Ford's desk,
it was a toothless bill that said metrication was encouraged, but voluntary.
Polls from this time show that Americans were fairly anti metric.
Meanwhile, the most American of American businesses saw
the economic benefits off switching; DuPont, Caterpillar, Ford,
IBM, GM, John Deere,
and Xerox were all on their way to metric,
before the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.
The process was easier, cost less,
and saved more than the company's estimated.
Before metrication, GM had over 900 fan belts of various sizes in their supply chain.
After metrication, they only needed 100 sizes,
and that reduced the cost of warehousing all their parts.
Not only did they recoup their conversion costs,
they realized a profit.
Caterpillar said their switch to metrics saved them millions of dollars.
All of these companies managed the changeover by starting with new product designs.
Designers and engineers made the switch first,
then people in the manufacturing floor,
then the sales and field technicians.
They used in criminal training programs that GM summed up like this,
"Teach only those who need to know,
only what they need to know,
and only when they need to know it."
That's the approach companies have taken with consumers.
The stuff we buy from multinational companies is designed and
produced to metric specifications from your toothpaste to your car,
even if it ends up with US customary units on the label.
But living half in one world and half in the other,
has been costing us, perhaps,
most infamously, there's the time that NASA crashed an orbiter into Mars.
The Mars Climate Orbiter reported its thrust of firings in metric Newtons,
while Ground Control systems used pounds,
resulting in a navigation error,
enough to send the 125 million dollar orbiter,
crashing through the Martian atmosphere.
Today, the metric movement in the US is still creeping along.
Here's a broad embrace of international [inaudible].
This happened in 2015.
Let's join the rest of the world, and go metric.
He got laughed at, but still,
Hawaii and Oregon both introduced metrication bills,
they died in committee, but still.
Metrication experts say, the US is situated along a metric spectrum,
and were more metric than we realize,
our food labels and pharmaceuticals.
I guess for that matter street drugs,
our drug dealers sell cocaine in grams.
We're likely to continue this slow,
but steady creep towards full metric.
The TLDI, our government agencies,
and big companies switched when it made economic sense,
but individuals in their daily lives,
didn't have a strong enough incentive for going to all the trouble.
So, they didn't.
Obviously, this is a quick version of a really long story.
So, if you want to nerd out,
there's a really detailed and surprisingly readable history
of the US journey towards metric,
written in 1971, from the National Bureau of Standards and the US Commerce Department.
Thanks for watching. Hit the comments section to defend
the US customary system or argue passionately for the metric system.
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