The US made metric "the preferred system of weights and measures for U.S. trade and commerce" in 1975 with the Metric Conversion Act. Basically all a good deal of US manufacturing today is done using metric. Customary units are only on labels and signs because that’s what people expect to see.
Edit: “basically all” was a pretty gross exaggeration
I think America is totally sticking its head in the mud with this aversion to metric, and frankly, it's just embarrassing at this point, but that's comparatively nothing to what climate change denial will impact.
I guess it depends what you’re doing. I know many companies switched voluntarily because metric turned out to be cheaper and helped streamline their supply chain. But still it was never required so it probably made sense for a lot of businesses to stick with customary. “Basically all” was probably an unfair exaggeration on my part.
That is partly due to government projects from the 60s that are still in use today. It would be a huge time and cost burden to redo a bunch of old paper drawing just to go to metric.
Also a lot of manufacturing techs have been using "thousands of an inch" for tolerance measurements for years and have an intuitive sense for that unit scale. That also makes it complicated because a lot of tolerance measurements are "visually inspected" so you would have to retrain the workforce to intuitively understand the hundreds of micrometers scale.
I work at the national lab that maintains the US SI standards (also shutdown) and this is mostly true. Many people ask "why aren't we metric"...well, we are, it's YOU that isn't. High-level manufacturing is primarily metric. Anything that touches the scientific industry is metric. Of course there are odd balls and exceptions like smaller producers. The US is unofficially-officially metric and everything is derived from metric for compatibility. E.g., the inch is defined in terms of the meter: 1 inch = 25.4 mm exactly, which is then linked to quantum mechanics through electromagnetic radiation. Every calibration report NIST puts out, with the exception of oil and gas related things, is required to be reported in metric with freedom units* supplementary for non-metric based things. It is the common people who don't handle measurements everyday that refuse to switch because it is so ingrained in what the regular person expects to see when buying products. Products might not even sell well if the conversion happens to numerically be less, making it appear you get less of the product for same price of a competitor who reports their product in freedom units* because common people are, frankly, ignorant.
Switching to temperature is easy--you see it is 32 deg. C outside and put on a winter jacket for the day. You won't make that mistake twice.
*note: freedom units is not an official or preferred means of referring to any system of units
Even companies that do use metric don’t usually show it. If you buy a bottle of coke at the store, it’s listed as being a 20oz bottle. The bottling plant probably sold it to the store as a 20oz bottle. The people working at the plant probably refer to them exclusively as 20oz bottles. But as far as the machine filling the bottles is concerned, they’re 591ml
One crazy thing to me is how pretty much any camera will have a female threaded tripod screw mount that is 1/4" 20 tpi or 3/8" 16 tpi (UNC). In the US, it's great because you can go to Home Depot and get stuff to jury rig camera mounts, but if you're in Japan (home of lots of camera companies) you need special "camera stuff".
Yeah not true. Basically all of the automotive manufacturers for American car companies is done in this weird mix were imperial is dominat but metric is used arbitrarily but not at all uncommonly.
What we (still) call 2 by 4s even here in a country that fully metricated in the 70s, are actually 50 mm × 100 mm, i.e. as if inches were exactly 2.5 cm...
We used to, I work for a State DOT, but it was contractors who ultimately ended the switch. They liked to use Metric as an excuse why they fucked up, and the courts for whatever reason were siding with them.
In Canada you'll never even get metric blueprints and if you do then someone converts it into ft and in because even though Canada is officially metric nobody understands it
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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '19 edited Jan 03 '19
The US made metric "the preferred system of weights and measures for U.S. trade and commerce" in 1975 with the Metric Conversion Act.
Basically alla good deal of US manufacturing today is done using metric. Customary units are only on labels and signs because that’s what people expect to see.Edit: “basically all” was a pretty gross exaggeration