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Whatever happened to the metric system? : how America kept its feet / John Bemelmans Marciano.

by Marciano, John Bemelmans.

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Bloomsbury, c2014.

Metric system -- Miscellanea.

Metric system -- History.

Units of measurement.

Standards of length.

Weights and measures.

Time -- Systems and standards.

Calendars -- History.

9781608194759 (hc.)

1608194752 (hc.)

Alternate title:

Metric system : how America kept its feet

First U.S. edition

310 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 22 cm

Includes bibliographical references (pages 276-300) and index.

The day the metric died -- Thomas Jefferson plans -- American Paris -- Metric systems -- The decimation of everything -- Napoleonic measures -- Lighthouses of the sky -- The internationalists -- A universal coin -- The battle of the standards -- Standard time -- A toolkit for the world -- The Great Calendar Debate -- Shocks to the metric system -- A metric America -- Isolated -- Appendix A. U.S. customary and metric measures -- Appendix B. Customary metric measures.

Most of the rest of the world is on the metric system, and for a time in the 1970s America appeared ready to make the switch. Yet it never happened, and the reasons for that get to the root of who we think we are, just as the measurements are woven into the ways we think. Marciano chronicles the origins of measurement systems, the kaleidoscopic array of standards throughout Europe and the thirteen American colonies, the combination of intellect and circumstance that resulted in the metric system's creation in France in the wake of the French Revolution, and America's stubborn adherence to the hybrid United States Customary System ever since.

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