tions of society, one would have expected that it would have been one of the first nations to adopt the new metric system that was introduced in France in 1800. But the history of the attempts to do so is decidedly mixed. American Congress authorized the use of the metric system in 1866. In 1959, American measurements were defined in relation to the metric system. In 1968, the government ordered a study which was published three years later under the title "A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come". The year 1975 then saw the Metric Conversion Act, leading to the establishment of the US Metric Board. Amended in 1988, it resulted in the Metric Program, an organization founded to support the various federal agencies, which are required since 1991 to file an annual report on their efforts to change to the metric system. ln spite of all these attempts, the United States of America are still the one maj or industrial nation that does not use the metric system as the predominant one. To this day, American schoolchildren have to count with miles that contain 1760 yards, yards that contain 3 feet, and feet that contain 12 inches. They have to memorize that an acre is 4840 square yards, and that a gallon contains 231 cubic inches. The costs of this are undoubtedly huge — they include, for example, the Mars mission of 1998 that failed because measurements were converted wrongly. Still, the general attitude of the American public towards the metric system is largely negative. There are websites with telling addresses like...