Why doesn't the US use Metric?

Title: Transcript - The United States and the Metric System

Speaker: Unknown

Time: Unknown

Date: Unknown

Place: Unknown

[Background information: The speaker talks about the United States' history with the metric system and its struggle to adopt it as a standard system of measurement.]

Speaker: The United States was brand new and it needed standards for weights and measures, but each state was doing its own thing. New York had a Dutch system, while other states were using measurements based on English units, French and Spanish. This made interstate commerce a mess. Thomas Jefferson, the secretary of state at that time, was a Francophile and was intrigued by France's new decimal-based system of weights and measures. He asked for some of it, and French scientist Joseph Dumais was dispatched to the US with a one-kilogram copper weight called a grave and a one-meter scale. Unfortunately, his ship hit a storm and he ended up in the Caribbean, where he was intercepted by British privateer Teres who stole the metric doodads and threw him in prison Almanzora, where he died.

The US was pretty well settled on what's called the US customary system, which is based on UK's imperial system. In 1866, Congress authorized the use of the metric system and supplied each state with their own set of metric weights and measures, but people didn't like it. The US system was, and some argue still is, just more accessible and relatable. A foot is about the length of your foot and inches about the width of your thumb. It's tangible and it's been consistent. Today's kilogram is not exactly the same weight as that copper doodad back from 1793. It's changed a little bit.

By the mid-20th century, the world's economy was becoming more and more globalized. And if you wanted to do business internationally, you had to do metric. The UK switched in 1965 because they wanted access to more European markets. In 1971, Congress recommended that the United States go metric within 10 years, but it didn't. The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 encouraged the use of metric but didn't require it. So Americans kept doing what they were doing.

Big business in America did see the value in going metric, however. They were saving millions of dollars. So big companies like Xerox, GM, IBM, Ford, they all switched to metric long before 1975, and most big American companies followed suit. The American scientific community also saw benefits to switching, especially after NASA crashed the Mars Climate Orbiter into the Martian atmosphere. Because the thrusters on the orbiter were being measured in metric Newtons, the ground control was still using pounds, so that was years of work and $125 million vaporized because they didn't use metric.

Congress tried again with the Omnibus Foreign Trade Act in 1988, the Savings and Construction Act of 1996, and the High-End Computing and Revitalization Act of 2004, but still no joy for metric. What metric needed in America was a champion, a forward-looking leader who could take the country into the 21st century. And during the 2016 presidential campaign, a champion emerged with a bold vision for having the United States join the world by implementing metric. That champion was Lincoln Chafee.

[Closing statement]

In conclusion, the metric system has had a rocky history in the US. Although the country has made attempts to switch to it, the US customary system remains the norm. Nonetheless, the importance of using the metric system in scientific fields and international commerce cannot be denied.