Yet regimes all over Europe adapted it anyway. The reason the US retained its system has less to do with the units being so intuitive and more to do with having industrialized early enough that switching would have been expensive.
I have the same (I assume), innate understanding of the various metric units, given that I was exposed to it all my life. It's easy for me to glance at something and know if it's as big as a centimeter, a couple, perhaps a decimeter or even a meter. The same goes for the volume of something. I think it has more to do with your education, and experience in life, than it's with... the arbitrary way someone came about with those units.
Nothing against the imperial system, I understand how difficult it is to leave it now, and no-one could predict if the metric system were to take off at the time. I wish all of us would use only one though.
> Western Europe was more
> industrialized than we were[...]
While the US (mostly) used a consistent system, different countries, or even different cities and towns in Europe had incompatible systems when metric was introduced.
> Now here we are, the last
> holdout.
In practice though it’s not as though metric is not used to a significant extent in some contexts even in the US. Your medications do not list the contents of their active ingredients in drams.
There's BSP (imperial), but be careful, it's not the diameter that's in inches, it's the inner diameter.
Then there's the common 15mm and 22mm copper water and gas pipes, and Alpex 16mm and 20mm.
https://www.totaline.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/17-Ca...
My Spanish is rather bad, but I think this:
> Los tubos son producidos según los estándares establecidos por la norma internacional ASTM B88 y B88M.
Says that ASTM B88 and it's metric equivalent are accepted. As you'll see from the listed dimensions the latter is truly metric, while the former is imperial.
[1] https://www.enargas.gob.ar/secciones/normativa/pdf/normas-di... [2] https://www.enargas.gob.ar/secciones/normativa/pdf/normas-te...