When the United States first became a thing in 1776, the bottom line law of the land was a document known as the Articles of Confederation, which was basically a state’s rights advocates wet dream. Not surprisingly, trying to organize what amounted to thirteen independent countries into a single cohesive unit with a federal government whose only power was to ask nicely didn’t really work out so well. The weakness of the federal government resulted in the country entering into an economic tailspin, various states getting close to declaring war on each other, and an outright revolt against the newly created United States government. Tiring of such shenanigans, the founding fathers met up to try again, eventually creating the U.S. Constitution in 1789, which gave the federal government sweeping new powers to keep the states in line. Amongst these was the ability of the U.S. Congress to fix a universal standard of weights and measures.
Now at the time, what had been the original thirteen colonies was a complete cluster fuck of every state using different standards of weights of measures, which were largely terms pulled out of people’s asses based upon random objects decided upon by various idiots in England and the Netherlands over the preceding centuries. It should go without saying that this made interstate trade a god awful needlessly complicated mess. The idea of having a universal standard was viewed as a way to bring the states more together into a single nation, and was seen to be of such great importance that George Washington mentioned it in his first state of the union address. Being a politician who actually got things done, Washington soon after set his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, to the task of coming up with such a standard.
Now Thomas Jefferson was a man who thought France was just the tits, having lived there for five years, only returning on Washington’s behest to serve as Secretary of State. At the time, France was going through a little period of unrest today known as the French Revolution, which like the earlier American Revolution was a fight for equality and the end of monarchy, but unlike the American version involved murderous mobs cutting peoples’ heads off left and right. While Jefferson wasn’t all that down with wanton head chopping, he was very interested in various ideas being made by French intellectuals to modernize the country, first and foremost amongst them a brand spanking new standard of measure known as the metric system, which used all sorts of sciencey mathematical formulas to break all measurements into handy dandy units divisible by ten. For instance, a meter was one ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the North Pole, the liter was a volume equal to 0.001 cubic meters, and a kilogram was the mass of one liter of water.
Unfortunately, many of the members of Congress were not so impressed with this new Frenchy way of measuring things, with many wanting to make up their own more American system and others wanting to just stick with the current standards they were used to, because learning new things is hard. Some members of Congress even went as far as to claim the metric system was the work of the devil. As a result, nothing was done for some three years, frustrating Jefferson to the point that he finally wrote to some friends in France asking them to send somebody to convince his colleagues to quit being such idiots. The French, loving the shit out of Jefferson, for some reason sent a botanist by the name of Joseph Dombey with a copper rod one meter in length and a copper cylinder weighting one kilogram. It’s rather uncertain exactly how a guy who loved plants holding a rod and weight was supposed to convince anybody that the metric system was the best, but sometimes it’s the thought the counts. Anyways, it didn’t really matter, because on the way across the Atlantic Dombey’s ship got captured by pirates and he died six months later a captive on some tropical island.
Back in the United States, the debate over a standard of measures continued for another two years, with Jefferson desperately trying to get Congress to accept the metric system, of which many members continually caused delays because they just didn’t care. This might have been the state of things for god only knows how long, except in 1795 the U.S. Army and its Native American allies managed to finally beat the British and their Native American allies in a ten year conflict known as the Northwest Indian War, opening new wide swaths of formerly Native American territory in what is today Ohio for settlement. Selling land was a great way for the perpetually broke U.S. government to raise money, but in order to do so they needed a standard measurement for land. Since most of the settlers flooding into the area were of Scot-Irish descent, Congress just went with the familiar English system most recognized by these settlers, passing a law that made it the universal standard in 1796. Though there have been many subsequent attempts to change to the metric system, this English system remains in place to this day.