What better way to show how brilliant, but half-arsed America is than the Metric system? If not for her crippling post Revolutionary War debts and the Northwest Indian War, America may have stolen the metric idea from the French. Several American Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, had created a decimal measurement system for America to adopt in the 1790s. However Jefferson's bill languished and died in the early US Senate.
It was a rather accurate foreshadowing to the next six attempts to metricate and two hundred years of American history.
We live in a half-arsed, half metricated country. The metric system is demanded by industries such as manufacturing and the sciences that need simplicity, precision and standardization to properly function. But most Americans remain stubborn in using the King's foot and other antiquated Imperial units that barely 10% of the world's population can understand. It's a burden to our ease of communication and financial well-being, but yet we persist.
It's high time we finish what we began at the founding of our country. In our most recent attempt in the 1970s, Washington and President Carter set up our country to fail once again. Politicians assumed that a bill focused on metric education would work, but totally forgot to actually draw up a concrete plan on how we should metricate. Oops! After about a decade of amusing public service announcements, it was President Reagan that finally put an end to the sad effort.
Perhaps I'm making a mistake in thinking will Washington ever begin to work again. Two centuries of American government has demonstrated otherwise, and our laundry list of to-dos is getting longer and longer. Still I have a 21st version of a candle lit for America. My cell phone created by American ingenuity is set to Celsius rather than Fahrenheit.
I am a part of a metric forum called www.reddit.com/r/metric. Yes, there IS a website for everything.
