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The United States and the Metric System (LC 1136) nist.gov Archive.org; The Metric System in the United States Archived June 11, 2017, at the Wayback Machine; A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come on nist.gov Archive.org; Metric Conversion Act of 1975 on nist.gov Archive.org; www.us-metric.org—U.S. Metric Association (mirror link)
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.
This act declares a national policy of coordinating the increasing use of the metric system in the US. It established a US Metric Board whose functions as of 1 October 1982 were transferred to the Dept of Commerce, Office of Metric Programs, to coordinate the voluntary conversion to the metric system. [92] In January 2007 NASA decided to use ...
The US Customary system of units was developed and used in the United States after the American Revolution, based on a subset of the English units used in the Thirteen Colonies; it is the predominant system of units in the United States and in U.S. territories (except for Puerto Rico and Guam, where the metric system, which was introduced when ...
At the First United States Congress, which met in 1789 when the decimal metric system had not yet been developed in France, the system of units to be used in the U.S. was one point of discussion. Under the Constitution (article I, section 8), the Congress has the constitutional right to decide on a standard of weights and measures .
The table of imperial avoirdupois mass is the same as the United States table up to one pound, but above that point, the tables differ. The imperial system has a hundredweight, defined as eight stone of 14 lb each, or 112 lb (50.802 345 44 kg), whereas a US hundredweight is 100 lb (45.359 237 kg). In both systems, 20 hundredweights make a ton.
Units in everyday use by country as of 2019 The history of the metric system began during the Age of Enlightenment with measures of length and weight derived from nature, along with their decimal multiples and fractions. The system became the standard of France and Europe within half a century. Other measures with unity ratios [Note 1] were added, and the system went on to be adopted across ...
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 the ...