“On this boat, we measure by yAAARRRRds!”

In the 18th century, the country was still young, and the rate of measurements varied by state. New England was using English systems while New York was all about those Dutch systems. The only thing more confusing than interstate trade in the 1800s is when your friend tries to explain the third act of Inception to you.

The country had to do something, and Thomas Jefferson was all set to pitch the French system, i.e. the metric system, to his colleagues. To really impress the big Whigs, Jefferson sailed Joseph Dombey (a botanist who was well-versed in how useful the metric system was in trading) over to use his big fancy science words to convince everyone to adopt it. During his journey, Dombey’s ship got caught in a storm and got blown way off course ... right into pirate country, which we assume was 90% of the planet back in those days.

The pirates imprisoned Dombey, who died in confinement. Jefferson never got his expert, and the country adopted the British system of measurements. And now students all over the U.S. get to learn about the metric system for a few confusing days before they are abruptly thrust back into their regular studies as if those days never happened.

We Don’t Use Celsius Because The Public Ignored The Metric Conversion Act Of 1975

The United States measures everything with Fahrenheit, which appoints the freezing and boiling points of water to be 32 and 212, respectively. On the Celsius scale, the freezing and boiling points of water are zero and 100, respectively. Again, the U.S. was incapable of realizing how dope base-10 is, despite the fact that we’ve gotten multiple chances to use it.

See, Fahrenheit was cool hundreds of years ago when Daniel Fahrenheit (real name, we swear) was the first to get a consistent temperature reading between two different thermometers. We assume that this was followed by dozens of models pouring champagne on him in slow motion. Later that century, Anders Celsius (again, real name, we swear) found another, simpler way to take accurate readings, and by the mid 20th century, most of the world hopped aboard the Celsius train.