why does a few countries like the US use a different unit of measurement for size/distance than the rest of the world?
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Mostly America does it out of inertia, fun fact the American system uses metric as the standard so an inch is officially 0.0254
Any country can use any system it wants.
Obviously before Metric, a lot of people started building stuff using Imperial units. That meant factories and a lot of building supplies standardized on inches and feet. When the Metric System came out there were some bills in Congress to try and change to it, but the people who manufactured things complained about how much money it would cost and paid Congress to keep the Imperial system. Other countries decided in the long run it would be worth the pain and changed. (It didn’t hurt that many other major countries sustained *severe* damage during the world wars compared to the US, so were in a better position to rebuild manufacturing around Metric.)
Schools still teach the Metric system and especially science-based classes use it extensively. But practically all public measurements are still Imperial just because it’d cost a lot of billionaires some money to change (and the longer it goes on, the worse it gets) and it’d be a shame if they lost a little bit of money.
For the USA, it’s force of habit. Having used the old British units for centuries, hard conversion seemed too much trouble. (Things like changing from 2″x4″ lumber to whatever dimensions are used elsewhere.) And it’s a large country that mostly trades with itself.
Though soft conversion mostly has happened. E.g. the inch was redefined to be *exactly* 25.4 millimeters. And a lot of technical/scientific work is done using metric.
Because America can get away with it. We’re large enough and profitable enough that people will still work with us even if we keep the imperial unit system. There was a concerted effort during the Carter administration to switch to metric, but there was so much resistance that ultimately it never moved forward.
It used to be that every place in the world had their own units that were different from ever where else.
In medieval Europe that went to the point where sometimes each city had their own system of measurements and they all had the same or similar names.
Anytime some government managed to take control over a large enough region they tried to standardize things (for tax purposes if nothing else), but often rather than one single standard this just added one more system everyone was using.
You see remnants of this in the way things like gold are weighed in different ounces and pounds than other things and how there are “liquid” and “dry” version some units and how there are different types of miles for going over land or water.
As you can imagine this did not make trade easy when there were many many more of these things.
When the enlightenment happened and people got into fads such as science and overthrowing old systems, they cam up with a new system.
It would be defined “scientifically” and the conversion between different units would be based on a simple common system using powers of 10.
This got adopted throughout Europe and much of the world thanks to European imperialism and became the standard the entire world uses.
The US was supposed to adopt it too, but pirates stole the examples. It was attempted to introduce the metric system several times since then with mixed success.
The US kept using a system based on the old British one that sues many of the same names, but in part has entirely different values. (a pint in the US is different from an imperial pint).
Today US units are legally defined by us law in terms of metric units.
As for the other countries that also still use the old system.
The UK and Canada use parts of the old system in everyday life and SI units for everything else. Liberia didn’t adopt the metric system because it was founded as a weird sort of colony of the US, some pacific islands that are technically independent countries but practically function as pseudo Us territories us the US system. And then there is Myanmar which is just weird in many ways.
So basically it is really just the US that is left with the old system.
And they use metric units too in many areas of life especially scientific ones.
Also new units that describe electrical phenomena and such are all metric.
A Volt for example is technically just a short way of saying: one Kilogram times one square meter divided by one second cubed and one Ampere.
You might be interested in the [history](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bnehb5/What_were_the_historic_arguments_for_America_confining_itself_to_the_Imperial_system_when_the_rest_of_the_world_used_another%3F_Surely_this_was_bad_for_business_during_industrialization_among_other_things%3F/en8i5pb/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3) behind the US not adopting the metric system.
The US is a metric country, legally, since the passage of the Metric Conversion Act in 1975.
Americans, on the other hand, don’t always do the things the government tells them to do. They can also be super stubborn and cheap. They just don’t want to change, and they don’t want to spend money to change all the signs that say XYZ miles to Los Angeles.
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