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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Marciano, John Bemelmans, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Metric system.

Weights and measures--United States.

Weights and measures.

History.

United States.

Metric system--History.

Physical Description:

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

Edition:

First U.S. edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Bloomsbury, 2014.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

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

ISBN:

9781608194759

1608194752

OCLC:

826452273