ABSTRACT
For almost its entire existence, National Bureau of Standards (NBS) has been interested and directly involved in America's bumpy and prolonged transition to the metric system of measurement. This chapter describes the NBS’s A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come, relating the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the author. Because of its importance as the summary document of the most significant study on national metrication issues ever conducted by the United States government, the Metric America publication has been cited as a reference in hundreds of books, magazines, and newspaper articles. Two other NBS/NIST publications, The Chart of the Modern Metric System and A Brief History of Measurement Systems with a Chart of the Modern Metric System, also serve as important tools in the effort to promote metric literacy.
