The Imperial System Vs The Metric System

I know it's super annoying that the United States uses the Imperial System. It can be extremely inconvenient for foreigners to convert all the information to the Metric System units, and that's because the Imperial System units are all out of order (they aren't in units of 10).

But what's interesting is that the Imperial System originated in the UK, and not in America. The Metric System was first adopted in France, and basically every country in the world now uses it. But for some reason, America hasn't gotten the memo yet.

The other two countries that use the Imperial System are Myanmar and Liberia. I've also heard the UK uses both systems, so there it's your pick.

If we get into the historical perspective of things. No one really had any other way of telling the temperature. The most accurate at the time was Galileo's thermoscope from the 1500's. Obviously that was very inaccurate. Fast forwarding do 1714, German scientist Daniel Gabriel created the Fahrenheit scale after inventing the Mercury thermometer.

The scale is shown in order from coldest to warmest temperatures in Fahrenheit below:

Gabriel mixed ice, water, and salt at 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

He then placed the freezing point of water at 32 degrees.

Next, he placed the average body temperature for humans at 96 degrees Fahrenheit (even though now it's 98.6).

Finally, he placed the boiling point of water at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

In 1724, Fahrenheit was placed into the British Royal Society after becoming familiarized by people in the area.

Since the UK conquered large parts of the globe in the 18th and 19th centuries, it brought along the Imperial System including units like feet and ounces (added by the British). This made the Imperial System the standard system for measurement and temperature all over the British Empire.

Before I talk about why America uses the Imperial System, I'm gonna talk about its units, and how they compare to the Metric System.

The Imperial System goes like this:

12 inches= 1 foot

3 feet= 1 yard

1760 yards= 1 mile (5280 feet also= 1 mile)

16 ounces= 1 pound

2000 pounds= 1 ton

Freezing Point In Fahrenheit: 32 degrees

Boiling Point In Fahrenheit: 212 degrees

(That's a 180 Degrees difference)

Oh and also, (and this is also part of the Imperial System), we put our month first, then the day, the the year. That looks like this: MM/DD/YYYY. But that doesn't make sense because you're going from the medium sized unit to the smallest sized unit to the biggest sized unit.

So basically us Americans are used to all these weird conversion factors. In fact, it's become so normal that we expect foreigners to know all this stuff too...even though that's not fair or logical.

Ahh, yes the world famous Metric System. In a way we can say Americans are ignorant for not changing to the Metric System, but we aren't going down alone. Liberia also uses it because well, we owned them. Then out of all countries there's Myanmar who don't use it for some reason either. And then the UK (the country that made the Imperial System) basically switched over to the Metric System to be cool and fit in with the rest but don't realize us Americans are honoring them.

Okay now, the history part.

The year was 1670. French scientist Gabriel Mouton was a church vichar in Lyons (now called Lyon), France. He saw the problem with the already made Imperial System. The units were all very wonky because it was pretty obvious no one really had a way of remembering any of it.

To fix this, Mouton made a system with bases that were all units of 10 as shown below:

The Metric System goes like this:

1000 millimeters= 1 meter

1000 meters= 1 kilometer

1000 grams= 1 kilogram

1000 kilograms= 1 ton

Freezing Point In Celsius: 0 degrees

Boiling Point In Fahrenheit: 100 degrees

To dumb it down, the Metric System makes more sense because everything's in a unit of 10. Regarding the date format, it looks like this: DD/MM/YYYY. You're going from smallest to biggest, so that in fact, does make things a lot more practical.

If you haven't figured out already, the Metric System makes a lot more sense.

The French Government didn't actually enforce the system until 1795 after a ton of refining by scientists. And from then on, many countries saw the sense of the Metric System and adapted it.

All of this also had to do with the French Revolution that happened in the late 18th century. That's because France wanted to trade with the allies, and needed a surefire way of making sure that everything was in the perfect units.