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The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 is an Act of Congress that was signed into law by U.S. President Gerald Ford on December 23, 1975. [1] It declared the metric system "the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce", but permitted the use of United States customary units in all activities.
The legislation states that the federal government has a responsibility to assist industry, especially small business, as it voluntarily converts to the metric system of measurement. The legislation required most federal agencies to use the metric system in their procurement, grants, and other business-related activities by the end of 1992. [26]
American surveyors use a decimal-based system of measurement devised by Edmund Gunter in 1620. The base unit is Gunter's chain of 66 feet (20 m) which is subdivided into 4 rods, each of 16.5 ft or 100 links of 0.66 feet. A link is abbreviated "lk", and links "lks", in old deeds and land surveys done for the government.
A system of units of measurement, also known as a system of units or system of measurement, is a collection of units of measurement and rules relating them to each other. Systems of measurement have historically been important, regulated and defined for the purposes of science and commerce .
The system was officially adopted by the federal government in 1975 for use in the military and government agencies, and as preferred system for trade and commerce. [167] Attempts in the 1990s to make it mandatory for federal and state road signage to use metric units failed and it remains voluntary.
The prefixes are never combined, so for example a millionth of a metre is a micrometre, not a millimillimetre. Multiples of the kilogram are named as if the gram were the base unit, so a millionth of a kilogram is a milligram, not a microkilogram. [5]: 122 [11]: 14 The BIPM specifies 24 prefixes for the International System of Units (SI):
One argument used by opponents of the metric system is that traditional systems of measurement were developed organically from actual use. [3] Early measures were human in scale, intuitive, and imprecise, as illustrated by still-current expressions such as a stone's throw, within earshot, a cartload or a handful. These measurements' developers ...
The imperial and US customary systems of measurement use the SI for their formal definitions, the yard being defined as 0.9144 metres exactly, the pound avoirdupois as 0.453 592 37 kilograms exactly while both systems of measure share the definition of the second.