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Electric Monk

(13,869 posts)
9. Technically, metric has been the official U.S. measurement standard for more than 100 years.
Sat Aug 15, 2015, 10:58 PM
Aug 2015
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-hidden-history-behind-lincoln-chafees-metric-proposal

(snip)

In 1893, after a fire in London damaged the original British Imperial Yard — the physical metal bar that determined for the world how long three feet should be — the U.S. federal agency in charge of measuring stuff started defining U.S. measurements in relation to their metric counterparts.

Since then, a foot is officially defined as 0.3048 of a meter. A pound is 453.59237 grams. “We’ve actually been on the metric system since 1893, in a sense,” Trusten said.

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