How Stewart “Whole Earth Catalog” Brand helped killed off the metric system in the US
In May of 1981, party people gathered for one of the nerdiest soirees ever to grace lower Manhattan. Billed as the “Foot Ball,” the event was an anti-metric shindig. Its revelers—including author Tom Wolfe and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand—had joined to protest the encroachment of the metric system into modern American life. They threw shade on the meter and kilogram, and toasted the simple beauty of old classics like the yard and the pound.
Crazy. (via _stunned)(tags: via:_stunned us-politics tom-wolfe stewart-brand luddism metric imperial feet path-dependence)