“What does the dollar have to do with the metric system? Or any system of weights and measures? Today, pretty much nothing. But up until recently — and we’re talking walking-on-the-moon recently — money was all based on weight. In the late eighteenth century, coinage was not only a part of weights and measures, it was the most vital part, and had been for thousands of years” (John Bemelmans Marciano, Whatever Happened To The Metric System? 13).