Ed Helms

Storage.

What do you think would be different?

Well, I actually think that it would have made a huge difference.

And it's impossible to sort of know the counterfactual, like what it would be.

But the metric system is so simple and it is so intuitive that I think it actually opens up a lot of construction and engineering to people that may not have benefited from it.

education.

I don't know.

I like to think that had we adopted the metric system earlier on, we may have advanced more quickly.

More people would have had more access to science and to engineering, and we would be in a more interesting place.

As it stands, we're still using the imperial system, obviously, and it's so clunky.

It's so hard.

You have to use special calculators to figure out these...

These fractions of inches and feet and that there's no it makes it's it's just so needlessly complicated.

But let's get let's actually get into the legacy of this a little bit because there's more to it.

Jefferson soon became president, as we know, in 1801.

Yet even then, he remained unable to make any progress metricating America.

Finally, in 1866, the Metric Act came to be, legally recognizing the metric system in the U.S., though not going so far as to make it mandatory in any way.

And there's an interesting reason for that.

Any guesses?

Yeah.