AHC: The USA excepts the Metric system

Your challenege is to make the USA accept the Metric system befor 1900.

The best time I see this happening is after the war of 1812. But it is your decision when it happens.
 
If we draw closer to France during the French Revolution or the Napoleanic Wars, I could see this happening. I think it'd be easier then than any other time, since we haven't begun industrializing yet and are just getting organized as a nation.
 
The US would probably have more impetus to switch to metric if its main trading partners also switched. Unfortunately, it looks like the earliest countries to adopt the metric system were mostly in continental Europe--if I recall correctly, America's largest trading partner was Great Britain, which did not switch until much later. So... either decrease the proportion of American trade with Britain, or get Britain to accept the metric system, and you might have a better chance.
 
Actually if Congress had been a little bit more forward thinking the US could have had an indigenous "metric system" about 10 years before the French introduced the one we know today. Thomas Jefferson introduced to Congress a Plan for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the United States in 1790, the more revolutionary of the proposals he made was a base 10 system based on the foot the bushel and the ounce.
 
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