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THEY PROPAGATED THEIR CONVOLUTED SYSTEM OF MEASUREMENT AROUND THE GLOBE
The metric system is a classic example of the British imperial strategy at work. First, the Brits use their "special relationship" with the United States to settle an old score with France. Second, we fight tooth and nail on the Evil Empire's behalf for decades, in a fight we don't even have a dog in, only to receive nary a word of thanks in return.

Invented shortly after the American Revolution by the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the metric system (or Système International d'Unités, as he called it) was designed to be a universal replacement for outmoded local systems. A foot, for example, is however long the guy holding the ruler says it is. A meter, on the other hand, is equal to exactly one forty-millionth of Earth's circumference, which is equal to a metal rod kept by the French Institute. Far more efficient than the haphazard British system of measuring things in caveman units like chains, stones, poles, links, furlongs, and even hogsheads, the new, clean metric family of units distilled distance to meters, mass to grams, and volume to liters. The British switched over in 1965, but America, famously loyal even to losing causes, has had a series of false starts, publishing a new report and convening a new board every ten years or so that this time, we're finally really going to make the switch.

Until then, the old British way of measuring things continues to cost our manufacturers millions of dollars a year. The worst casualty of the metric system may have come in 1998, when the Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the planet's atmosphere because U.S. contractor Lockheed Martin had given a key measurement in English pound-seconds instead of metric Newton-seconds. As tens of millions of U.S. tax dollars lay in shambles on the surface of the Red Planet, you could barely discern the sound of laughter coming from the graves of the old British geometers who got us hooked on their backward system in the first place.