Word: metrication
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Finally, by the 1960s, most of the rest of the world had gone or was going / metric. Congress responded with legislation, and in 1975, after years of debate, the Metric Conversion Act became law. The U. S. finally appeared ready for a decisive entry into a new metric...
Sure enough, signs in both miles and kilometers started to spring up on highways, along with posters exhorting drivers to THINK METRIC. Service stations started pumping gas by the liter. And consumers began to get queasy. "You didn't know how much you wanted, you didn't know how much you got, and you didn't know how much you paid for it," sympathizes G.T. Underwood, director of the Commerce Department's Office of Metric Programs. "But you knew you felt pretty bad about the metric system...
...metrification falter? Most believe it was because compliance with the Metric Act was purely voluntary. Indeed, about all the law did was establish a metric board to help manage the anticipated rush to conversion. From the start, the board had a built-in problem: in the interest of fairness, it was set up to reflect opposing points of view. But as a result, its deliberations repeatedly ended in deadlock. "Lining up for the metric system were the multinational corporations, the scientific community and educators," recalls Underwood. "Opposed were a great many consumers, who saw it as placing undue stress...
...Underwood. "Many of their meetings were quite acrimonious. People who came to them tended to be the naysayers, so the impression was that most of the public feed-back was strongly negative." The board, though legally still on the books, lasted just four years. In 1982 the Office of Metric Programs was created to move the responsibilities of the metric board to the Department of Commerce. Budget and staffing were cut, from $3 million to $300,000 and subsequently reduced even further...
These days, conversion to metric is just a vaguely unpleasant memory for most consumers. The highway signs are largely gone, and the pumps dole out gas mostly by the gallon again. The few visible monuments to metric conversion include liter bottles of soda and liquor, time-and-temperature signs that * still flash degrees in Celsius, and gram equivalents on food containers...