Maybe if one of the languages was Star Trek style Klingon - unpleasant, irritating, and incomplete. Oh, and you had to speak it backwards on odd days of the month, just to make it even clumsier.
Imperial units are primitive holdovers from a long-ago past before we had any significant science, technology, or engineering. They work fine to count how many puppies your dog just had, but fail miserably when you need to count, say, the number of transistors in an Intel i7 microprocessor, or the numbers of stars in our galaxy, or describe the mass of our sun.
Yes, you can manage to work with imperial units, for simple calculations, but even there, they massively hamper clarity of thought.
Even simple physical understanding of everyday objects is clumsy and confusing in Imperial units.
One example: I know that a cubic metre of water weighs 1 metric tonne. It follows instantly from the fact that one cubic centimetre of water weighs 1 gram. Anyone who studied physics or engineering in metric units probably knows this.
Now try asking people who grew up with imperial units how much a cubic yard of water weighs. Nobody knows, off the cuff, because the calculation is so convoluted.
The same kind of thing translates to all sorts of other areas. For example, consider an average man, who weighs around 90 kg. Because a person has almost the same density as water, I immediately know that the volume of an average man - we know 1 cubic metre of water weighs 1000kg, so 0.09 cubic metres weighs 90 kg. That must be his volume (with a few percent error).
The simple fact is that Imperial units hold back humanity from higher levels of knowledge. They are fine for building a fence, but so are metric units. There is no good reason for imperial units to still be used on planet earth - they're just primitive holdovers with no good reason for existing.
-Gnobuddy
In grad school, I spent a lot of spare time trawling junkyards for usable parts for my elderly Plymouth. If I needed a tyre, the cheapest way was to find a junked Chrysler, Dodge, or Plymouth car with one good tyre on it, pull it off, and buy the entire wheel (with tire) for $25.
During those years, it wasn't unusual to find an older Chrysler Corp. vehicle in the junkyard with a snapped-off wheel stud on the left (driver's) side. 🙂
-Gnobuddy
Not at all. Bangladesh's enormous slums are growing by millions more people every year, because these people are forced to abandon their ancestral homes due to constant flooding. Living conditions in these vast slums are absolutely appalling.
-Gnobuddy
So the takeaway is that Chrysler's left handed wheel nuts make as much sense as Imperial units. 😉
jeff
jeff
There was also a Chrysler model called - wait for it - the Chrysler Imperial. 🙂
So you could have a Chrysler Imperial, designed and built in Imperial units, with left-hand-threaded wheel studs. 😀 😀
-Gnobuddy
These are indeed 5 meter tapes for the Euro market re-made for traditional workers. I have several. I call them 16' and that is sometimes how they are sold.
Historically, rods were different in every town and by who was at church that Sunday.
I bought a property described all in rods. That was no big deal (US rod is standard enough for a farm). But it started at Five Mill Dam, ran through Robertson's woodlot, then to a tree with a fence growing out of it. The big dam flooded all small mills, someone musta took the fence-tree for kindling, and Robertson came and went between existing issues of tax records. AND THEN there is magnetic compass!! Same day to day but over 60 years it moved quite a bit. AND THEN--
I had the plot in feet and rotated to compass, placed it on the road corner, and it still did not match the town's new on-line tax maps. The street covered the front lawn, like 18 foot error. As seen in Google Maps Satellite (so I could see the hardtop, the roof, the tree where the road should be). As you say, the city had a derivative of the state coord scheme, and here in Maine that could even still be in rods or colonial perches. Best I could figure, the 1934 surveyor was a drinking man (it turned out he was notorious in these parts; the hi-class survey of the neighboring development revealed errors OTOO 3% back in the dense part of the lot).
I'm out of that land now, thank goodness.
Actually 1893, US Traditional measures linked to the French units. If you had to check your yardstick, you did not go to London, you went to Paris, and applied exact conversions.
I don't know for sure, so I consulted Google. This article claims that GM did the same on pre 65 Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac cars. I had a 62 Buick with a turbocharged V8 in it from the factory. I got it cheap, beat it hard for a couple years, and sold it cheaper. Don't really remember the left handed nuts, but I had driven Mopars all my life except for a 65 Pontiac, so left hand nuts would not have seemed odd to me. Chrysler abandoned that feature during the cost cutting moves to stay out of bankruptcy in the 70's. Another article states that Rolls Royce and Bentley also used left handed nuts.
https://www.motortrend.com/how-to/ccrp-0607-junkyard-crawl-lefthand-lugs/
Not long after moving to Canada, I needed a Robertson screwdriver for some small #2 brass wood screws.
The smallest Robertson tip I could find was size 0 (zero). It was too big.
What is smaller than size zero? I had to Google to find out if there was such a thing as a size 0.5, maybe, or (-1).
No. You know what's smaller than a size zero? A size zero zero. 🙄 🤦♂️
Because we all know that zero multiplied by itself is smaller than zero. Right? 😕
-Gnobuddy
For my '37 Plymouth, there are hub options with right hand and left hand thread bolts. Currently all are right hand, but I have some left hand spares. Takes effort to remember which one goes where.
Yes, like Roman numbers were insurmountable impediment for developing mathematics and engineering. If they had decimal system or a like, they would probably still rule the world.
Does your Plymouth have a Flathead 6 cylinder engine? My 1949 Plymouth had a 217.8 cubic inch "L head" (flathead, valves in block not head) engine. The same engine also came in a 230 cubic inch flavor in the Chryslers of the time. I know it was also used as far back as 1942, and lived on until it was superseded by the slant 6 in 1959.
Well yes, of course. But in the US the majority of hardware used is in inches, not mm. 1/4-20 reigns supreme.
Here in Panama it's a mixed bag. You'll see metric and Imperial mixed together. You can by produce by the pound, or by the kilo, gasoline is priced by liter but talked about in gallons. Water is sold in liters and gallons, hardware is a mixed bag of SAE and metric, dimensions in inches are common, properties are often listed in square feet or hectares. About the only thing strictly metric here are road signs and speed limits - always in kilometers.
Road signs and speed limits are metric here, too... I wish the speed was in miles with the same number though (limits are too low IMHO).
We can buy anything by weight in kg or lbs, but the larger price is for lbs because it's a lower number so appears cheaper.
I have just recently started using metric for measurements. I'm 177cm tall, and 80kg. I used to be 5'11 and 180 lbs. 🙂
And the only non-metric fasteners in my BMW are the 1/4" bolts I put in to replace the M6 that were stripped that hold on the cabin filter housing.
Even in the ROW, I'll bet the screws in your computer are still 6-32 and 4-40. I guess it's the same reason we still use an Edison screw base on lights - having a new standard is annoying for a lot of people. And costly. If everyone had to replace all their light fixtures because they changed the base, people would be incensed.
For me, I see one day, a DC system to replace 50/60Hz because inverters are lighter and cheaper than transformers. 90% of the stuff in my apartment could run from DC as it is - at least anything switching.
We can buy anything by weight in kg or lbs, but the larger price is for lbs because it's a lower number so appears cheaper.
I have just recently started using metric for measurements. I'm 177cm tall, and 80kg. I used to be 5'11 and 180 lbs. 🙂
And the only non-metric fasteners in my BMW are the 1/4" bolts I put in to replace the M6 that were stripped that hold on the cabin filter housing.
Even in the ROW, I'll bet the screws in your computer are still 6-32 and 4-40. I guess it's the same reason we still use an Edison screw base on lights - having a new standard is annoying for a lot of people. And costly. If everyone had to replace all their light fixtures because they changed the base, people would be incensed.
For me, I see one day, a DC system to replace 50/60Hz because inverters are lighter and cheaper than transformers. 90% of the stuff in my apartment could run from DC as it is - at least anything switching.