Our trip to Italy made me once again wonder with a tinge of frustration why the U.S. doesn’t use the metric system. Well, I finally got around to looking this up, and it turns out things could have been different! As NPR reports, Thomas Jefferson thought the metric system was “was just what America needed.” He wrote to a French scientist friend of his, asking him to bring the system to the States. Unfortunately, the scientist’s ship hit a storm and blew down into the Caribbean, where it was captured by pirates. The scientist eventually died in captivity. There were subsequent efforts to standardize on the metric system in the States, but the people were already too used to Imperial for behavior to change. “So,” NPR concludes, “for now, we’re stuck with Quarter Pounders and 9-pound hammers.” Le sigh. See also the SNL skit on this.
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