Nonetheless, she perseveres. Currently enrolled part-time in a Syracuse University doctorate program, some of her research centers on why every industrialized country went metric but the U.S. “One of the questions I started with was sort of like ‘Why haven’t we gone metric?’” Mitchell said. “And here’s the answer: We have, many years ago.” Well, yes and no. While many U.S. enterprises—from soft drinks and distilled spirits to cars, photographic equipment, pharmaceuticals, and even the U.S. military—are essentially metric, everyday use—Americans’ body-weight scales, recipes, and road signs, for example—hasn’t converted. And neither has the country’s educational system.

“I would say that the United States of America is at least 40 percent metric, perhaps even a little over 50 percent metric in practical terms,” said David Pearl, an Oregon government worker who, in his free time, is a self-appointed U.S. metric historian and purveyor of MetricPioneer.com. “But in the minds of many older Americans, metric measures are annoying at best and the work of the devil at worst, so some folks might say that America is 100 percent non-metric.”

Pearl will gladly send anyone his 31-page document, “SI: An Educational Overview For Americans,” which explains that the Metric Act of 1866 legalized the use of the metric system for weights and measures in the U.S.

It also explains that the U.S. founding father Benjamin Franklin helped develop the metric system and that Thomas Jefferson championed a version of it, though most Americans still think of metric as not American. What happened with the country’s measurements between 1866 and 1975, when President Gerald Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act—which established the Metric Board and was supposed to mean Americans would all be using kilograms and millimeters instead of pounds and inches by now—is rather complicated. Suffice to say going metric has always been a political football. In the early days, the metric proponents lost elections and the customary—that is, pounds and inches—guys won. The issue continued to get tossed around, however. Then around the late 1870s, U.S. manufacturers of high-end machine tools effectively blocked the country’s metric conversion. By that time they were using a measurement system based on the inch and argued that retooling would be prohibitive.

Ford’s Metric Act, however, promised to right that once and for all. And, to a large extent, U.S. businesses that trade internationally went metric (except for their U.S. consumer-facing info). For a brief time, a metric-only U.S. education looked certain, too, though often criticized and opposed by the public largely on the grounds that it simply wasn’t American.

Then President Ronald Reagan, using public opposition to his advantage, dismantled the U.S. Metric Board in 1982. It was a move that John Bemelmans Marciano called “the day the metric died” in his book Whatever Happened to the Metric System?