Comment by inglor_cz
1 day ago
This is quite similar situation indeed. It was once easier to adopt the metric system when the infrastructure was not yet as developed around the previous ones.
Austria-Hungary adopted the metric system in the 1870s. Back then: no cars, no highways, no speeding laws etc. Oxen-drawn wagons in the countryside were not built to a precise spec.
Only the railway, the architects and the artillery had to really switch. Ordinary people would still ask the grocer for half a pound of ham in the 1930s.
USA in the 1970s would have to remeasure all the land communications etc., or end up with a weird hybrid like the UK.
WHat we have in IPv4 and IPv6 is the weird UK-like hybrid...
Australia managed to do a complete† change over starting in the 1970s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia
It's going to take decades, mostly waiting for the non-metric folks to die off probably and the raised-on-metric folks to grow up, but if you don't start you'll never finish.
† Can Aussie HNer confirm?
I'm Australian and the only things measured in imperial units is babies (stones? But I think younger parents now use metric, but my parents only know baby weights in stones), beer (pints, but not the same as overseas I think, also it can vary by state), certain types of land units ("acerage" is a common land plot size) and height (feet and inches, for some reason people don't understand it in metric)
These are all customary usage so I'd say we are completely switched over, we couldn't tell you generally what these units look like outside of "how big is a baby" or "how tall is that person" or "is my beer large or small" really.
AFAIK you all use imperial pints, which are a little bigger than the ones used in countries that still use the customary system (US and I assume Liberia). I'm pretty sure your pints are the same as those used in the rest of the commonwealth, but corrections are welcome.
That goes back to the fact that the imperial system replaced the older customary system after the American revolution. The US legislated a somewhat simplified version of the Customary System the English were using at the time, which was a piecemeal system based on several different acts of parliament over hundreds of years. We (much) later made slight changes so that our measurements are based on metric.
The Imperial System was instituted in the UK in 1826 and most of the measurements stayed the same, which is why our foot and pound are the same as your foot and pound. The biggest change was that imperial simplified the various liquid measurements to make them uniform. Before then, different liquids used different measurements. The gallon used in the US was originally based on the wine gallon whose value had been last set by parliament in 1709.
Babies would be measured in pounds and ounces, as they weigh roughly ½ stone at birth.
Canada also changed over in the 1970s. I was told as a kid that the US had planned to switch with us but backed out at the last minute. I'm not sure if that's true or not. Today, the imperial system holds on in a few places, like heights and weights of people (although not at the hospital) and cooking temperatures.
> Today, the imperial system holds on in a few places, like heights and weights of people (although not at the hospital) and cooking temperatures.
Construction: "two-bys" are used, with 16/19.2/24" offsets for studs and such (though the building code has millimetre equivalents).