The strongest push in the U.S. actually came at the start of the 20th century, Alexander Graham Bell, and other notables testified at congressional hearings on metric conversion.

The US lives in a metric gray area. It has a few laws requiring that consumer goods list both metric and US customary measures, but it still remains isolated in its US customary measures bubble.

And Chafee isn’t the first to suggest the switch. In fact, U.S. politicians and advocates have been trying to introduce the metric system for pretty much as long as the country has existed: none ...