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Americans are vehemently opposed to the metric system
in any way shape or form. Why? As far as I can tell
it's a NIH problem (not invented here). It's perceived
as someone forcing a change upon us, and Americans
love to fight change from without.
My first job from school as a Mfg Engineer (TW with a
different name) was working with a French/German
designed missile launcher to be built in the US. Of
course all of the drawings were in metric. The older
US machine tools had no provisions for metric.
BTW a master mechanic built the prototype by himself,
took it apart, and made drawings from it. Akin to one
programmer creating an application, then asking
everyone else to create the specs & documentation
afterwards.
Then they arbitrarily assigned tolerances
without knowing the context. We had brackets with
1mm (.0254 in) positional tolerance, whereas in
reality they could be off by the width of a hand.
We changed every drawing to show metric dimensions and
adjacent American dimensions in parentheses. However,
our tooling department refused to go along with this
practice. They included American measurements as the
primary and metric in parentheses. Occasionally I'd
get a call to check on a tool being built. They built
several tools at the wrong scale, due to this opposing
standard of documentation. Loads of fun!
The metric Americans know is 2 liters, as that
is the standard size of a bottle of soda, little else.
Other metric standards are slowly creeping into our
consciousness, such as A4 on the paper tray.
It'll be a slow, tortuous path for the US to catch
up to the rest of the world. I think the US is the
last to cling to the old measurement system.
There is hope, as those of us who were taught metric
in school, and subsequent generations grow up with a
familiarity with it. We just have little opportunity
to actually experience it, and that is how it will
get us to change.
I think it's quite amusing, actually, pathetic, but
amusing. Of course, I'm generalizing, for effect, as
not all Americans fit this profile, so don't get your
size 38 shorts in a knot, or trip over your size 43
Birkenstocks.
CB
>I mean, if you would ask the average Joe or Jane Blow
if they know what A4 is, would they know?
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