Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The inch, based on the length of a thumb, and the foot based on, well, the length of a foot, are inherently associated with human ...

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 ...

Just about every country in the world, apart from the U.S., Liberia and Myanmar, measures temperature in Celcius rather than Fahrenheit and measures length in centimeters and meters rather than inches ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

In May of 1981, party people gathered for one of the nerdiest soirees ever to grace lower Manhattan. Billed as the “Foot Ball,” the event was an anti-metric shindig. Its revelers—including author Tom ...

The French government adopted this new metric system on April 7, 1795. A conference including scientists from France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, and Italy worked from 1798 to 1799 ...