After the French Revolution in the late 18th 100 , the fledgling French commonwealth devised a new unit of measurement of measurement call the “ meter”—one ten - millionth of the distance between theNorth Poleand the equator . That became the groundwork for themetric system , which was eventually adopted in many other countries around the world .
The U.S. was n’t among them . ThoughThomas Jeffersondid show interest in the system when he was secretary of state in the 1790s , no change ever get to fruition . consort to Northwestern University history professor Ken Alder , Americans may have simply been resistant to the idea of standardizing something on a global scale . “ I realise when citizenry resent it as a remote force of globalization that grow uniformness , and it ’s perfectly noetic to want local control , ” hetoldLive Science . “ It can also be about taking a position against something that ’s hyperrational and French . ”
Furthermore , Britain ’s Industrial Revolution began to take time lag in the U.S. during the 1800s , and most manufacturers were calibrating machinery and measure products using inches , Ezra Loomis Pound , and all the other conversant units of Britain ’s imperial system . AsEncyclopaedia Britannicaexplains , shifting to the metrical organisation would ’ve been laborious and costly ; whenever Congress brought it up , business sector owners and citizens quickly close it down . Two 100 after , those same effect continue to keep the U.S. from committing to the metric system .
That ’s not to say we have n’t tried . In 1975 , Congress hand the Metric Conversion Act , which encouraged businesses to transition to metric building block of measurement . Since it was n’t required — and imperial unit would still be consent — it hardly upended the position quo . Later that X , PresidentJimmy Carterspearheaded a campaign to swap nautical mile for klick on road signage , but that did n’t stick , either .
Alder steer out that France was probably only able-bodied to implement a whole novel organisation because the res publica was in a DoS of staring upheaval at the time , and many other erstwhile processes were transfer , too . Britain was also undergoing a magnanimous - scale political redevelopment when it finally switched to the measured system in the 1970s . Because the U.S. government has been relatively stable since the formation of the Constitution , we have n’t had a standardized chance .
