C. W. McCall’s country gag song “Convoy,” which climaxed with a band of truckers smashing through a tollbooth in New Jersey, became the best-selling single in the country just before Christmas 1975. That was the year President Gerald Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act, pledging considerable funding and all the powers of the federal government to the project of converting Americans from English measures to the more sensible-sounding decimal system of meters and liters and grams. In England itself, “metrication” had been going on for a decade, with only mild grumbling. Americans met it with
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