Jefferson was responsible for US customary and got a lot of it working; the French were responsible for metric, but were interrupted by The Reign Of Terror.
Really? I struggle to see how dividing any number by two is easier than dividing it by ten, but would like to be enlightened. Divide by ten I just need to mentally move the decimal point, dividing numbers such as 35 or 123 by two requires a lot more mental arithmetic.
It's a snap to fold a piece of paper in half, thirds[0], quarters, sixths, eighths, (etc), but I'm not aware of a trick that lets you divide a sheet into tenths.
[0] Higher powers of three seem tricky too.
For example, how is "12 inches to a foot, 3 foot to a yard, and 1760 yards to a mile" base 2?
My understanding, before reading your post was that US customary was basically adapted from imperial which was in turn just an adaptation of folk measurements - a foot was about the length of a foot, etc.
How is dividing by 2 easier than moving the decimal point by 1 place?
Fold a piece of paper into 10 equal parts perfectly. Easy?
Yes, the USA uses inches and pounds and gallons. They also use m, g, and L. And picas and fingers and miles and decibles and watts and joules. Mostly they don't know or care. If they do know and care, they are usually capable of using whichever unit gets the job done.
This led me down a minor rabbit-hole.
In Australia, at least, hard liquor is sold in 700ml or 1 litre bottles. Wines (not what I'd call hard alcohol) are typically sold in 750ml.
Why 750ml is the default for wine bottles seems to be uncertain.
It may be any or more or none of :
750ml is roughly 1/5 of a gallon
750ml provides 6 servings of a 'comfortable' amount (about 125ml)
glass bottles, when blown rather than cast, were limited by the amount of air a glass blower could push into molten glass - this was around that figure.
Either way, none of that, in and of itself, is a compelling argument for metric.
We still colloquially call 750ml liquor bottles a “fifth”, so this is a plausible explanation.
(Curiously, we never say “a fifth of wine” even though wine is sold in 750ml bottles too.)
Utter nonsense.
The majority of native English speakers are American. Does that mean Brits, Australians, etc. are being “petulant” by spelling various words differently from Americans? Of course not. That’s just not how language evolution and standardization works.
By the way, nobody had to decide that “meter” specifically should be spelled that way. It follows the normal American spelling pattern in which all words ending in the consonant cluster /tr/ are spelled with “-ter”. Commonwealth English is actually more inconsistent as it sometimes renders the French “-tre” as “-tre” (metre, centre, theatre) and sometimes as “-ter” (master, plaster).