Why Does the U.S. Use Fahrenheit Instead of Celsius?

[cnm]

I have metric and standard tools, working as a carpenter, houses are still designed in feet and inches. An 8 ft sheet works with a 12, 16,19.25 and 24 inch truss layout. Standard measurements are far easier for house layouts.

Guess what will happen to house design when an 8ft sheet is a 2400 sheet?

 

[cnm]

The Canadian military has a self-inflicted problem in that some of their troops do not even speak the same language.

No habla?

 

[cnm]

The Fahrenheit scale was devised by German scientist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1724 and, in 1742, a Swedish astronomer named Andres Celsius came up with a less unwieldy system based on multiples of 10, which is the system used today in most of the world. PIXABAY

Why Does the U.S. Use Fahrenheit Instead of Celsius?

For one thing, it is more accurate.

Deplorables haven't heard of the decimal point.

 

[Yarddog]

There doesn't seem to be a logical answer, except perhaps inertia.

Nothing wrong with inertia. No reason to change for change's sake. Jimmy Carter tried to legislate the metric system into America in the '70s and it flopped miserably.

Yes; but just think. It was invented by a German.

Not everything that came out of Germany is bad ...

I come out of it once or twice a year. To the US.


The bread is amazing. And the doughnuts.

From what I hear, the bread in Sicily is the best in the world. Well, they have the best variety of wheat and still use old methods.

 

[cnm]

Each degree of Celsius is approximately 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus, it is not as precise a measurement as Fahrenheit.

In science accuracy is everything. That's why the hard sciences will continue to use Kelvin and Fahrenheit

You are a raving loony. As though all Fahrenheit thermometers are longer than Centigrade thermometer so therefore have an expanded scale. We can see the deplorable approach to science in your post. Well, ok, unscience.

 

[cnm]

Each degree of Celsius is approximately 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus, it is not as precise a measurement as Fahrenheit.

Well that might be the most absurd thing i have ever heard anyone say.

Kids: if you need "precision", you will be using decimal points. And yes, both scales are just as accurate as one another.

Don't despair, Westwall may well keep posting and break his own record.

 

[cnm]

The Celsius scale is too large as each is equivalent to 1.8 degrees Farenheit.

Liters are too small, as are kilometers and kilograms. Think about filling up your car and it taking 80 liters. Distances work better than kilometers. Everyone would love to weigh 75 kilos but the range is too wide. .

Liquid measure are

Get a grip Goldilocks. The Celsius scale is too large (can you tell the difference between 69 and 71 degrees Farenheit) and liters are too small (they're approximately a quart). Meters are about a yard. It would probably take the US only a week to get used to a new system.

Each degree of Celsius is approximately 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus, it is not as precise a measurement as Fahrenheit.

In science accuracy is everything. That's why the hard sciences will continue to use Kelvin and Fahrenheit

Your math skills suck, but everything else you said was on point. You quoted my post where I said each degree Celsius is equal to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, 212 - 32 = 180/10 = 1.8.degrees

Not only his math skills.

 

[Mindful]

So why is it that the U.S. uses a different temperature scale, and why doesn't it switch to be consistent with the rest of the world? There doesn't seem to be a logical answer,

There is no mystery, the decision to go with the english system today is mostly military and based largely on how difficult it makes both industrial and military espionage against us...
... in order to both steal and use American technology countries need both the metric system and english system in use requiring schools to teach it and factories to reproduce it meaning countries would have to run and pay for a 2 tier system where as here in the US we just use one of the many allies who already have the metric system in place to develop products and while converting a product from metrics to the english system it is in some cases impossible to do the reverse, the skin on one of the U.S.bombers [b-52?] was or is 1/52 of an inch, everything else made the bomber unsafe due to weight and maneuverability...
...the soviets once captured a U.S. b-29 and had to break down the plane into it's over 100,000 parts and then copy them exactly piece by piece, by the time they were done we were already 2 upgrades ahead...these "facts" came to me years ago so you may want to check them for accuracy but the point is an accurate one.

Problem solved ...

I've got one of those.

 

[fncceo]

I have metric and standard tools, working as a carpenter, houses are still designed in feet and inches. An 8 ft sheet works with a 12, 16,19.25 and 24 inch truss layout. Standard measurements are far easier for house layouts.

Guess what will happen to house design when an 8ft sheet is a 2400 sheet?

A 1 and 1/2 inch gap when the metric panel is too short.

 

[Frankeneinstein]

The persistence of Fahrenheit is one of those puzzling American idiosyncrasies, the equivalent of how the U.S. uses the word soccer to describe what the rest of the planet calls football.

lol...OK...Not sure why you are so puzzled by this but the reason is because in the U.S. the word "sucks" doesn't work or make sense when used in conjunction with the word "Football"

 

[Mindful]

The persistence of Fahrenheit is one of those puzzling American idiosyncrasies, the equivalent of how the U.S. uses the word soccer to describe what the rest of the planet calls football.

lol...OK...Not sure why you are so puzzled by this but the reason is because in the U.S. the word "sucks" doesn't work or make sense when used in conjunction with the word "Football"

I'm not puzzled, just mildly frustrated at trying to do the conversions.

Your 'football' doesn't make any sense, because it doesn't have much to do with the foot.

 

[karpenter]

Because Fahrenheit is easier to spell.

And Makes A Better Novel And Movie Title

 

[Frankeneinstein]

I'm not puzzled, just mildly frustrated at trying to do the conversions.

I must have misunderstood what you meant when referring to it as "puzzling"...and we [the U.S.] don't have any problem with the conversions

Your 'football' doesn't make any sense, because it doesn't have much to do with the foot.

Yeah, same problem the metric system has

 

[Bob Blaylock]

Jimmy Carter tried to legislate the metric system into America in the '70s and it flopped miserably.

I can remember that. I want to think it was late elementary school to early Jr. High School for me, which, yes, would roughly correspond to the Carter Administration. There was a very big push in public schools, at least the ones I attended, to teach us the metric system, and to encourage its use. It just never took root.

The closest that metric ever came to taking root here in the U.S. was when gasoline started to break $1/gallon. Many gas pumps of the era weren't equipped to charge a dollar or more per unit of gasoline, so many were reconfigured to dispense gas in liters rather than gallons. This mainly had the effect of driving consumers to gas stations that had pumps that still dispensed by the familiar gallon; and stations that had pumps that were limited to less than a dollar per unit, in order to stay in business, had to upgrade their pumps.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

I remember that CARTER thing-----it was like he could not think of anything
to do. BIG problem for me------101 degrees is no longer fever and 98.6 is
no longer "normal" for simplicity-----in weather 20 degrees is something
like 70

Interesting bit of trivia. When Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit devised his scale, he used the coldest temperature he could produce, from salted ice, as zero, and his own body temperature as a hundred. He was ill at the time, with a fever. Had he been healthy at the time, we would now consider 100°F. to be the normal body temperature; or whatever he normally ran. It actually varies from one person to another. I normally run about a degree or two cooler than what is considered “normal”.

If we were going to standardize on a different scale, my preference would be for the Kelvin scale. Both the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales have the oddity that zero on the scale is not truly zero. That makes as much sense, to me, as a length scale where zero is defined as some arbitrary, significant, positive length, and where lengths shorter than that have negative values. The Kelvin scale has its zero point at true absolute zero.

 

[Mindful]

Jimmy Carter tried to legislate the metric system into America in the '70s and it flopped miserably.

I can remember that. I want to think it was late elementary school to early Jr. High School for me, which, yes, would roughly correspond to the Carter Administration. There was a very big push in public schools, at least the ones I attended, to teach us the metric system, and to encourage its use. It just never took root.

The closest that metric ever came to taking root here in the U.S> was when gasoline started to break $1/gallon. Many gas pumps of the era weren't equipped to charge a dollar or more per unit of gasoline, so many were reconfigured to dispense gas in liters rather than gallons. This mainly had the effect of driving consumers to gas stations that had pumps that still dispensed by the familiar gallon; and stations that had pumps that were limited to less than a dollar per unit, in order to stay in business, had to upgrade their pumps.

You use the metric system for your money, don't you?

 

[Bob Blaylock]

You use the metric system for your money, don't you?

I don't know that our money is defined by •THE• metric system, but it is based on powers of ten.

And here's something interesting that I learned, a year or s ago.

The dollar, of course, is our basic unit of currency. We also have a unit called a cent, which is defined as 1/100 of a dollar. Look at the back of an American penny, and you'll see that it states its value as one cent. Look at a nickel, and it will state its value as five cents.

So, what does it state, as the value, on the back of a dime? Ten cents? No. It gives its value as one dime. It turns out that we also have an officially-defined unit of currency called a dime, which is defined as 1/10 of a dollar.

We have some other officially-defined units which are much less widely known or used. There is a mil, which is defined as 1/1000 of a dollar. The smallest coin ever issued was a 5-mil coin, or half a cent. Some states, at one point, issued 1-mil tokens, that could be used to pay taxes which were assessed down to the mil.

Also defined, but not widely used, are the eagle, which is ten dollars, the union, which is a hundred dollar, and the grand, which is a thousand dollars; though “grand” is often used as a sort of a slang term, by people who mostly do not realize that it's not really slang, but a true, officially-defined unit, that means exactly what they think it means as a slang term.

This has led me to wonder about something. Motor fuel prices are nearly always specified to the mil. If I were to go to a gas station,and buy exactly a gallon of gasoline priced at 3.499/gallon, and I were to use cash or a debit/credit card to pay for my purchase, it'd be rounded to the cent. I wonder if it's possible, that if I went to a gas station that would accept a stone-age paper check, if I could write a check for exactly $3.499, thus paying the exact price of that gallon of gasoline, and if my bank account would then have its balance reduced by that exact amount, down to the mil. I wonder if internally, banks maintain balances to a finer granularity than the cent. Seems to me like they'd have to, to accurately calculate interest in some cases.

 

[Mindful]

You use the metric system for your money, don't you?

I don't know that our money is defined by •THE• metric system, but it is based on powers of ten.

And here's something interesting that I learned, a year or s ago.

The dollar, of course, is our basic unit of currency. We also have a unit called a cent, which is defined as 1/100 of a dollar. Look at the back of an American penny, and you'll see that it states its value as one cent. Look at a nickel, and it will state its value as five cents.

So, what does it state, as the value, on the back of a dime? Ten cents? No. It gives its value as one dime. It turns out that we also have an officially-defined unit of currency called a dime, which is defined as 1/10 of a dollar.

We have some other officially-defined units which are much less widely known or used. There is a mil, which is defined as 1/1000 of a dollar. The smallest coin ever issued was a 5-mil coin, or half a cent. Some states, at one point, issued 1-mil tokens, that could be used to pay taxes which were assessed down to the mil.

Also defined, but not widely used, are the eagle, which is ten dollars, the union, which is a hundred dollar, and the grand, which is a thousand dollars; though “grand” is often used as a sort of a slang term, by people who mostly do not realize that it's not really slang, but a true, officially-defined unit, that means exactly what they think it means as a slang term.

This has led me to wonder about something. Motor fuel prices are nearly always specified to the mil. If I were to go to a gas station,and buy exactly a gallon of gasoline priced at 3.499/gallon, and I were to use cash or a debit/credit card to pay for my purchase, it'd be rounded to the cent. I wonder if it's possible, that if I went to a gas station that would accept a stone-age paper check, if I could write a check for exactly $3.499, thus paying the exact price of that gallon of gasoline, and if my bank account would then have its balance reduced by that exact amount, down to the mil. I wonder if internally, banks maintain balances to a finer granularity than the cent. Seems to me like they'd have to, to accurately calculate interest in some cases.

That's what I meant. The British went over to units of ten during the decimalisation of a previously unfathomable (to foreigners) currency.

They still sell eggs in batches of 12.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

That's what I meant. The British went over to units of ten during the decimalisation of a previously unfathomable (to foreigners) currency.

They still sell eggs in batches of 12.

They do here, as well. It's still quite common to see certain things sold by the dozen. By the gross (a dozen squared, or 144) is less common.

By the way, you know what the most disgusting number is? It's 288. It's two gross.

 

[Mindful]

That's what I meant. The British went over to units of ten during the decimalisation of a previously unfathomable (to foreigners) currency.

They still sell eggs in batches of 12.

They do here, as well. It's still quite common to see certain things sold by the dozen. By the gross (a dozen squared, or 144) is less common.

By the way, you know what the most disgusting number is? It's 288. It's two gross.

Have you ever figured out lbs and stones?