American Customary (a.k.a Freedom) Units vs Imperial vs Metric

[Stefan Mikes]

They put a man on the moon and invented the atom bomb with that system.

Science uses the Metric system, even in the U.S. I do not need to remind you the Project Manhattan and later H-bomb were the German, Italian, Danish, Hungarian and Polish, with the Americans having had studied in Europe pre-WW2? Wernher von Braun, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller or Stan Ulam? Yes, Oppenheimer was American.

How the French and English managed to build concorde is beyond me.

Somehow the Brits learned the metric system. Doable. The British, German and French built Airbus, too. Interestingly, Airbus' management had to find the way to sell to the U.S. market so decided to adopt the U.S. aviation units: nautical miles, knots, feet, feet per minute. The fuel is in kilogram I guess. It is hPa or in Hg for barometric pressure (optional). Not sure about the temperature units (C?) and visibility (probably km or statute miles per geographic area).

Please check the famous "Gimli Glider" air incident. An airliner got its engines flamed out because of fuel starvation mid-flight. In those times, the Canadian hadn't learnt the conversion between litres, kilograms and pounds yet

 

[Chargeride]

Scientists used metric, engineers used inches.
Apollo and the bomb were built in thousandths

 

[Stefan Mikes]

What was about that space probe that went off course and never came back because someone confused the decimal dot with decimal comma?

 

[Stefan Mikes]

Chris, let me say something. I have lived off American software for the last 35 years, and am glad the Houston boys and girls took care of the unit conversion from the day 1

The name is CHEMCAD.

 

[Chargeride]

What was about that space probe that went off course and never came back because someone confused the decimal dot with decimal comma?

Did you know UKs two aircraft carriers were broken for months and months because of faulty French balancing software, they kept trying to fix it and just made it worse.
Eventually we discovered zere were too many onions on one side of ze andul beerz.