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the United States didn't follow, because of “the humble screw thread.”

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Chafee's call for the United States to adopt the metric system generated an immediate backlash.

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We've arrived at a hybrid system. Most American rulers show inches along one edge, centimeters along the other

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The people blocking adoption of the metric system weren't backward-looking traditionalists, but cutting-edge industrialists

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The most sophisticated and powerful opponents of the metric system were engineers who built the industrial infrastructure of the United States.

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For want of a screw, the metric system was lost?

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Much of the world started moving to the metric system in the late nineteenth century.

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Back in 1972, Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell was attacked by his Republican opponent for wasting time on low-priority items like the metric system. The politician leveling that attack? John Chafee.

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National pride is at stake. The adoption of another country's weights and measures—or in the case of the metric system, the rest of the world's weights and measures—seems an infringement on national sovereignty. That the system in question has a long and distinguished history as a pet project of Francophile, cosmopolitan liberals probably doesn't help make it appealing to American conservatives.

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If history is any guide, government fiats don't work when it comes to weights and measures. The undertow of history and custom is too strong (proponents of the metric system, for example, are often unaware that it took many decades for France to get its citizens to adopt it—there were many, many setbacks and a staggering amount of resistance).

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Whatever the drawbacks of the English units, the inch was divided in ways that made sense to the mechanics and machinists of the era: it was built around "2s" rather than "10s," with each inch subdivided in half and in half again—and so forth. This permitted various sizes of screw thread to have some logical correspondence to all the other increments. The same was true of the sizes of other small parts that were essential modern machinery.

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While the anti-metric forces included outright cranks, including people who believed that the inch was a God-given unit of measurement, the most sophisticated and powerful opponents of the metric system were anything but cranks. They were engineers who built the industrial infrastructure of the United States. And their concerns, while self-interested, were not entirely off base.

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They had based their entire system—which encompassed everything from lathe machines to devices for cutting screw threads—on the inch. Retooling, they argued, was prohibitively expensive. They successfully blocked the adoption of the metric system in Congress on a number of occasions in the late 19th and 20th century.

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Many factors played a role in frustrating the adoption of the metric system in the United States. But much of the opposition from the 1870s onward came from the manufacturers of high-end machine tools

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It permits nations, individuals, or corporations who would otherwise be hampered in their efforts at communicating, trading, or sharing information. Think of it as a common language. If everyone in the world speaks English, it's very easy to do business, travel, and engage in trade. The same is true of a single, standardized system of weights and measures.

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Many experts agree. Which raises an interesting question: Why, exactly, doesn’t the United States already use the metric system?

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“People say it’s expensive, but the economic benefits outweigh the cost,”

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Labeling it “the worst idea” of the campaign, the National Review’s Jim Geraghty blustered, with perhaps a touch of humor: “You will get my American system ruler when you pry it from my cold dead hand.”

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"let's join the rest of the world and go Metric" he said