Hah...  I'm not blaming anything on the British! Well, not tonight, anyways (I'm 3/4 Irish, so I got lots of stuff to pick on them for)...  The Imperial System made the best out of the situation at the time...  And the UK started integrating metric in the 1960's, whereas I'm in Canada, and we didn't really start working on it until the mid-1970's.  Also the Brits in North America in the 1700-1800's were starting to use metric over here.  'murricans didn't like it much when the British were trying to teach them these new, better units that they learned from the French.  I'm blaming the US for shooting it down every time people push for metrication there.  When there's only three countries that exclusively use the wonky measurement system that someone developed back around the Norman Conquest, and it's still virtually unchanged a thousand years later...  The only real thing the 'murricans changed was the size of a pint.  They can't hang with Canadians, Irish or British like that...  They needed to lower the strength of the beer and take a 20 ounce pint and make their American pint only 16 ounces.

The biggest nation of drug users, and the main measurement system for drugs is also the metric system...  So they can manage to score a couple grams in a sack, and can figure that much out...  All they have to do is take another step and they're halfway to adopting it.  

I do gotta say though...  If they're really the "best country in the world", then how the hell is Liberia going through metrication before they do?

P.S. Thank you for this post, I really enjoy your mining threads to get a chance to see new equipment