Why does the US not use the metric system? If our country was based off of a British colony wouldn't we use their system? Was it imperial back then? And if so why did we stick with it.
In 1975 Congress saw which way the world was going and passed the Metric Conversion Act, which set up a Metric Conversion Board to...well, that was perhaps the immediate problem. The MCB had no mandate, there was no deadline for conversion of, say, the auto industry to metric by 1985, petroleum industry by 1988, etc. It could only suggest, publicize, advise, pay for surveys of public opinion..
And talk. Another problem of the Board was diversity. That is not a very bad thing, typically, but there were 16 members, one each representing engineers, scientists and technicians, state and local governments, construction industry,manufacturers, retailers, educators,standards organizations ( like ASME) ;two each representing labor and small business, and four at-large for consumers and others. This was very broad, and not only did they not agree on goals, priorities, and methods: some did not even agree that there SHOULD be a conversion to the metric system. The result was the Board ended up arguing and debating and doing, really, very little- (though, of course, it had not been given a deadline for actually getting something to happen, anyway). As US Metric Association Louis B Sokol noted
the diverse makeup of the Board and the weakness of the Metric Conversion Act contribute to the Board's inability to exercise the type of leadership which knowledgeable, progressive people expect. The Board in action has all the outward appearances of a debating society. The blame for this to a great extent falls on President Carter, whose staff, for political reasons, appointed several known obstructionists and persons with little if any prior knowledge of metrication.
The MCB was ended under the term of Ronald Reagan, and mostly the effect of it from 1975 to 1985 was only seen on Interstate highways, where signs reading, say, " DENVER 121 MILES had a small sign added saying "or 195 kilometers".
But really, increased global commerce meant that metric was eventually adopted in many places despite the absence of government leadership . Scientists and their journals moved to metric. Most automotive techs, engineers and machinists now work in either metric and imperial. Food and drink are still mostly imperial ( though drinks are often in liters), as are construction and building. But then, houses and buildings are very durable goods, lasting a long time, and their measurements tend to endure: what plumber wants to splice metric pipe into a 2 inch water line coming into a house, when she could just use more 2 inch pipe?
Britain only really began considering the metric system following the Weights and Measures Act (1897) which legalised the use of the metric system in manufacturing and commerce. Even then, it was only the Weights and Measures Act (1985) that actively outlawed the commercial use of a wide variety of traditional Imperial measures, such as bushels, stone, quarts, square miles etc. The gradual use of metric had been increasing since the 1960s as Britain sought closer trading links with the nascent EEC, and even today, Imperial measures are broadly colloquially used, and are still legally allowed as long as they are displayed alongside their metric equivalents. Distances, for example, are typically recorded in miles, personal weight in stones (although weights for cooking etc. are typically in metric), and height in feet and inches.