Abstract
The United States is famously the largest of a very few nations whose everyday weights and measures are not metric. Less well known are the facts that the US was among the signatories of the Metre Convention in 1875 or that the meter and the kilogram have been the fundamental standards of length and mass in the US since the late nineteenth century. The US and the metric system have had several episodes of approach and avoidance over the whole of the lifetime of that system. This chapter describes briefly the history of the status of the metric system in the US. At present the system is legal in the US and is used in some applications; however, customary units remain the weights and measures most commonly employed by most people in the US for everyday purposes.
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Notes
- 1.
Kelvins are not used for mass media meteorology; however, degrees Celsius are an SI unit, albeit not a base unit.
- 2.
Road signs in the United Kingdom still use miles.
- 3.
I use “non-metric” to describe nations like the US in which customary non-metric units predominate in everyday use. In the twenty-first century there are no countries that don’t use the metric system, as discussed below, and the metric system is used in the US.
- 4.
Actually, the resolution to distribute metric standards to the states came a day before the vote to legalize the system [9].
- 5.
In the context of this chapter, voluntary refers to the free choice of a business or other user of weights and measures in contrast to legal compulsion imposed by the sovereign government in which the business operates. In Chap. 3, recall, voluntary refers to a free choice of a sovereign government in contrast to a colonial or other occupying force.
- 6.
The 2021 amendment within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 made no substantial changes, simply updating references to other parts of US law.
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Giunta, C.J. (2023). The Metric System and the United States. In: A Brief History of the Metric System. SpringerBriefs in Molecular Science(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28436-6_6
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