Ever wonder why America sticks to inches and pounds? Turns out, pirates played a surprising role in keeping the metric system at bay.

The US almost adopted the metric system—but a ship carrying the official standards was intercepted by pirates. That’s right, pirates may have changed the course of American measurement forever. This ...

The United States could be using the metric system — the universal system of measurement that every industrialized nation uses except the U.S. — if it wasn’t for a bunch of pirates 224 years ...

At press time, only three of the world's countries don't use the metric system: the United States, Myanmar and Liberia. But it didn't have to be this way. On this day in 1866, the Metric Act was ...

It declared metric “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce.” The push by Ford was part of a larger effort in the country to adopt metric.

It seems worth noting that one of America’s safeguards against the forces of tyranny — the United States military — conducts just about all of its business in, you guessed it, the metric system.

The US uses metric to “define all basic units used in commerce and trade” and says using the metric system with the imperial system actually makes the United States “a truly bilingual nation”.

Back in the 70s, President Ford and Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 to coordinate and plan for the eventual conversion to the metric system in the United States.

Regarding Chris Stokel-Walker’s review of Beyond Measure, opposition to the metric system hasn’t been limited to the UK (18 June, p 34). Back in the 1970s, the US Congress passed the Metric ...