[DManA]

How many rods you got on your car?

Franklin and Jefferson both advocated for the metric system.

[Gaffer]

Who cares? How many kilograms of hamburger do you buy?

What is the acreage on the deed to your home?

[Gaffer]

A rod is a unit of length....please tell me how that would relate to the metric system on a car?

[Gaffer]

That might have worked back then...but it seems usage and time won, didn’t it. Why screw it up with an even longer history of usage and time? Doesn’t make sense...it won’t change anything tangible in the end - only interpretations of commodity amounts.

[Verginius Rufus]

Franklin died on April 17, 1790. Possibly he advocated the principles on which the metric system was based, but I think the fully-developed metric system was put in place after his death. I don't know how much he might have heard, before his death, of the preliminary steps being taken towards creating the system.

The kilometer was originally 1/10,000th of the distance from the equator to the North pole...that may have sounded scientific to the inventors of the system, but in terms of the universe, the dimensions of the earth are utterly insignificant. The mile, of course, is from the Romans--1,000 paces.