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The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 is an Act of Congress that was signed into law by U.S. President Gerald Ford on December 23, 1975. [1] It declared the metric system "the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce", but permitted the use of United States customary units in all activities.
The legislation required most federal agencies to use the metric system in their procurement, grants, and other business-related activities by the end of 1992. [26] While not mandating metric use in the private sector, the federal government has sought to serve as a catalyst in the metric conversion of the country's trade, industry, and commerce.
Conversion of units is the conversion of the unit of measurement in which a quantity is expressed, typically through a multiplicative conversion factor that changes the unit without changing the quantity. This is also often loosely taken to include replacement of a quantity with a corresponding quantity that describes the same physical property.
Included in the law was a table of conversion factors between the traditional and metric units. The United States Coast Survey (which in 1878 became the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey) Office of Weights and Measures had on hand a number of metric standards, and selected the iron Committee Meter [ 6 ] and the platinum Arago Kilogram [ 7 ] to be ...
World map, colour-coded to show the years the countries started the process of official conversion to the metric system. Using data from PhD thesis by Hector Vera and NIST. Metrication or metrification is the act or process of converting to the metric system of measurement. [1]
The International System of Units, internationally known by the abbreviation SI (from French Système international d'unités), is the modern form of the metric system and the world's most widely used system of measurement. It is the only system of measurement with official status in nearly every country in the world, employed in science ...
The obsolete troy pound was divided into 12 ounces, rather than the 16 ounces per pound of the avoirdupois system. The apothecaries' system was traditionally used in pharmacology, but has now been replaced by the metric system; it shared the same pound and ounce as the troy system but with different further subdivisions.
A similar system, termed British Engineering Units by Halliday and Resnick (1974), is a system that uses the slug as the unit of mass, and in which Newton's law retains the form F = ma. [5] Modern British engineering practice has used SI base units since at least the late 1970s.