I'm bombarded daily with comments from folks outside of America, Liberia, and Myanmar, telling me how stupid and backwards we are for not adopting the metric system.

I do think it's a little ironic that so many of their arguments center around calling a nation of 350 million people arrogant while presuming to tell them what markings should be on their rulers, from the other side of the planet. And I've poked a little fun at that in the past. But truthfully, I can see how people who don’t understand how fractions work may be afraid of a combination square with strange markings on it.

Still, I do like the simplicity of a system that can be so easily divided by ten. And I admit, I wouldn't cry if Americans were to join the 7 billion metric users in the world. In fact, we're already well on our way.

You see, in the early days of our little republic, Thomas Jefferson lobbied for pretty much anything that had any connection whatsoever to the French Revolution. And one of the first things the French did after storming the Bastille, and trimming the King approximately 30 barleycorns shorter, was calculate the distance from the North Pole to the Equator along a meridian that ran through Paris. Then they divided that by 10 million because, why not, and that produced a new unit of measure they called the meter.

Of course, they made an error in their calculations, so the official meter is off by about a quarter of a millimeter. But the math is easier, and if there’s one thing I know about the French, it's that they hate math.

Sadly, the first efforts to get the metric system implemented in the U.S. didn't work. It's a long story involving shipwrecks, kidnapping, pirates, murder—boring stuff.

What's more exciting is the Metric Act of 1866 and the Metric Conversion Act of 1975. Of course, those and other efforts ultimately failed to stop most Americans from measuring things with their feet. But our government has never needed to pass laws to implement unpopular policy. They just do it behind the scenes, little bits at a time.

And that's exactly what they did. Today, all sorts of things in the U.S. are metric.

Our money has always been metric in that it’s based on a system of tens. There are ten cents in a dime, ten dimes in a dollar, ten dollars in the average American's savings account, and so on. Even the official weight of our coinage is measured in metric grams.

While we worry about the devaluation of our money, many of us turn to drinking. And how is that alcohol measured? In milliliters.

Likewise, the nutritional labels on all of our food are metric. A serving of Doritos contains 270mg of sodium, rather than 1/8 of a teaspoon of salt.

When you have to go on blood pressure medication from eating too many Doritos, it too is dispensed in milligrams, while your injections might be measured in CCs—cubic centimeters.

When was the last time you heard the size of a car engine measured in cubic inches? It's been liters for a long time now. And forget about working on a car anymore without a set of metric tools.

When you clean the grease from your hands and want to unwind by shooting at a few 2-liter bottles in the backyard, you'll find your .38 Special is now a 9mm.

Even the military has long since gone metric. If something is said to be 3 clicks away, that means 3 kilometers. And when they're out in the woods surveying your militia bunker, they're using cameras with 35-millimeter lenses.

A lot of folks like to say there are two types of countries on Earth: those who use the metric system, and those who put a man on the moon. But the truth is, NASA has always used the metric system. In fact, when an outside contractor’s imperial measurements weren’t properly converted to metric in 1999, years of work and $125 million burned up in the Martian atmosphere.

As a lifetime user of the Imperial—or, as we call it, the United States Customary System—I admit, we’re already mostly a metric country and becoming more so all the time. Pretty much all we inch lovers have left are shoe sizes and our thermometers.

Even in my workshop, there are metric options on most of my tools. If it weren’t for the scale on my table saw fence, I might be able to build entire projects without even thinking of barleycorns and cubits. In fact, I might even try it and see what all the hype is about.

What about you? Would you go metric if the rest of the U.S. does? Do you think we’ll ever completely take the leap?

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