When former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee announced he was joining the 2016 Democratic primary race, some people scratched their heads when he said switching to the metric system would be one of ...

December 23, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, designed to bring US weights and measures in line with the rest of the world. The United States is one of the last holdouts ...

So much for American exceptionalism: Democratic presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee used his campaign announcement Wednesday to urge the U.S. to switch to the metric system of weights and measures. ...

Americans have long used diverse weights and measures, reflecting their diverse origins. From colonial times, converting from one unit to another was part of courses in commercial arithmetic. The ...

I was at the supermarket recently when I took note of something my eyes had passed thousands of times before. The cans of my favorite sodas were 12 ounces, while the bottles were 2 liters. It caught ...

May is a month full of celebrations—everything from May Day and Cinco de Mayo to Mother’s Day and Memorial Day. Largely forgotten in the cornucopia of May celebrations, however, is National Metric ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

On April 19, 1973, Wilson Riles, superintendent of public instruction for California. called to announce that beginning in 1976 the metric system would be taught in California. The reaction from the ...

On April 7, 1795, France adopted the metric system. As late as 1920, only about 25 percent of the world’s population was using it. But today, it has become the accepted system of measurement just ...