It was

You get used to it. We changed many years ago. It is quite easy and more descriptive than fahrenheit. 0 and its freezing 25 and its nice out

@273kelvin However, the Celsius graduations are too coarse. Also tell any American it is 40 degrees Celsius, "Are you hot or cold?"...few will know.

@dahermit 40 is bloody hot and you would know about it. Fahrenheit is a crazy scale invented by a drunken german. Celsius is easy especially when combined with the metric system. The key is water, 0c freezing, 100c boiling, 1ml = 1g, 1 ltr = 1kg, simple

@273kelvin "40 is bloody hot and you would know about" Only if the American experience it, not if he was "asked" about it. My point was that the side-by-side system that was intended to shift America to the metric system did not work. Americans still do not use kilometers to measure distance nor kilometers per hour to measure speed. Having worked in industry, they do not measure or use machinery that is calibrated in metric. One of the few things that caught on was the shift from grains to grams in the medical/pharmaceutical field. Still gallons of gas instead of liters, etc. What the government should have done, was to leave things alone...there was no big advantage in going to metric. Those of us who were machinists just converted metric measurements to English and set the dials on our machines to the appropriate thousandths of an inch. Those Americans who grew up with English measure, cannot seem to adjust to thinking in Metric. For instance, ask the average American which is larger...8MM or a quarter inch...and observe the blank stare...they can show you a space between their fingers equivalent close to a quarter inch, but unless the are the few who have actually worked with millimeters, the will not have a clue about the distance that is approximate to 8MM.

@dahermit The UK went metric (sort of) we still have pints, miles and therefore mph but these are measurements for the individual, not for export. In all else its metric. The advantage of this is trade. If you make tools, kitchens, pipe or anything that you wish to sell outside of the US. Then there is a distinct advantage to using the sizes that the rest of the world requires. It is only that the US is the biggest market that has kept her from this.
A dual system can only work in a short term interim period. In the end you have to bite the bullet as we did and plunge wholeheartedly into metric. Anything else courts chaos.
The biggest fuck up not involving injury or loss of life. A joint mission between NASA and the european space agency (ESA) sent a probe to Mars.All went well until it approached the red planet and then it just disappeared. An investigation was launched to discover how this $5 billion project could go so wrong. In the end they discovered that NASA was calculating entry speeds using mph whilst ESA was using the international scientific standard Mps. It just burnt up

@dahermit True but then a lot of Americans think that Australia is somewhere in the US too.

@dahermit, @273kelvin Yes when I lived in Sweden and used to drive on the left hand side of the road 1967, the whole country changed to the right side to follow rest of Europe and people did not panic or have accident. It is doable if you give people the right information and eduction.

@273kelvin "...these are measurements for the individual, not for export. In all else its metric. The advantage of this is trade. If you make tools, kitchens, pipe or anything that you wish to sell outside of the US. Then there is a distinct advantage to using the sizes that the rest of the world requires. It is only that the US is the biggest market that has kept her from this." That was the pro-conversion rhetoric those many years ago...that it would be "better" for industry. However, assuming that when I entered industry, everything would be Metric, imagine my surprise when I discovered that the company into which I was hired to be an industrial trainer (Olofsson Corporation), that made and sold machine tools both domestically and internationally, just converted Metric measurements to English with a calculator and did the machining in English (thousandths of an inch). And then put Metric dials on their machine tools (their product) and shipped their machines to the countries that had ordered them. So for all intents and purposes, they were producing machines with the requisite Metric standard. When I asked why they did not convert everything (Olofsson's production machines, measuring devices, gauges, etc.) to Metric they said, "Why?". What they were doing worked, and the U.S. customers wanted English dials and measurements anyway.

None the less, I understand how two ((or several...there was both European Metric and a different Japanese Metric, two English metric standards (European Metric and "Whentworth" metric) at one time)), can cause problems. When I was a Machine Shop instructor in a Michigan Public School, I had given the students an assignment where they would take a piece of metal, drill a hole in it on our Asian-made vertical mill, turn the dial so many thousands, and drill another hole, then present it to me for measurement. I was confused when none of the students were getting it right...so I demonstrated how to do it again on the mill. Much to my surprise, when I was turning the "X" dimension dial, I counted off the graduations as marked, ".010, .020, .030, .040, .040!...two hash marks, marked ".040" ten thousandths apart. I suspect the Asians who built the machine were not able to understand English characters or markings.