Why doesn’t the U.S. use the Metric System? Pirates. In the late 1700s, the U.S. had no standardized system—each state used different measures, causing chaos in commerce. George Washington called for ...

Finally, I thought, I don’t have to worry about how to round off some impossibly large number such as the speed of light ... as a whole evades the metric system while most of the rest of ...

But when it comes to height, distance and speed, the array and inconsistency of how things are measured is a far more dizzying curiosity. Australia converted to the metric system for measurement ...

In the meantime, a new system of weights and measures, developed by French scientists following the Revolution of 1789, gained increasing international use. This metric system had as its fundamental ...

Letter writers to newspapers decried the loss of a system in which freezing ... crossings warned U.S. motorists that “speed limit and distance signs are metric,” many remained befuddled.

NARRATOR: The metric system is a way of measuring things. So with length, the metric measurements are millimetres, centimetres, metres and kilometres. A stamp, would be measured in millimetres.

A nanosecond (ns) is a unit of time in the metric system, equal to one billionth (10-9) of a second (s). The second is the base unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), making the ...

In other words, the French introduced not only national standards, but a system of standards. It survives today as the metric system.