From Andro Linklater's "Measuring America - How the United States was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History":

Jefferson, having left office before the survey began, does not appear to have been aware of Hassler's innovation. He never warmed to the meter, regarding the meridian basis as an unnecessary act of French nationalism which, as he explained in a letter to Patterson, forced other nations "to take their measures from the standard prepared by France." But his enthusiasm for decimals did not diminish-one of the gadgets of his old age was an odometer that divided the mile into hundredths-and he boasted, "I find everyone comprehends a distance readily when stated to them in miles & cents; so they would in feet and cents, pounds & cents, &c:' He had always supposed that once decimal measurement was adopted by "the men of science;' it would only be a matter of time before it was taken up by "the tardy will of government who are always in their stock of information a century or two behind the intelligent part of mankind.”

That was also the view held by John Quincy Adams, the son of Jefferson's old antagonist and friend John Adams. In 1821, as secretary of state, he delivered a report to Congress on the feasibility of "establishing uniformity in weights and measures" in response to a request from the Senate. He made it clear that whatever changes were made would happen very slowly indeed, and illustrated his conclusion with a wry look at the lack of success of the nation's decimal coinage in displacing the old British and Spanish currencies. "Even now at the end of thirty years," Adams wrote,

ask a tradesman or shopkeeper in any of our cities what is a dime or a mille, and the chances are four in five that he will not understand your question. But go to New York and offer in payment the Spanish coin, the unit of the Spanish piece of eight [an eighth of a dollar], and the shop or market-man will take it for a shilling. Carry it to Boston or Richmond, and you shall be told it is not a shilling but nine pence. Bring it to Philadelphia, Baltimore or the City of Washington, and you shall find it recognised for an eleven-penny bit; and if you ask how that can be, you shall learn that, the dollar being [equivalent to] ninety pence, the eighth part of it is nearer to eleven than to any other number: and pursuing still farther the arithmetic of popular denominations, you will find that half eleven is five, or at least that half the even-penny bit is the fi-penny bit, which fi-penny bit at Richmond shrinks to four pence half-penny, and at New York swells to six pence. And thus we have English denominations most absurdly and diversely applied to Spanish coins; while our own lawfully established dime and mille remain, to the great mass of the people, among the hidden mysteries of political economy state secrets.

Had he been able to look farther ahead, Adams might not have been astonished by an official report made by a State Department representative to an international conference in Berlin in 1862, which revealed that almost eighty years after the decimal dollar became the currency of the United States, "shopkeepers still more readily say two shillings and sixpence than thirty-seven and a half cents." But even he might have been startled to find that in the twenty-first century, the quarter was still known as two bits, and that the New York Stock Exchange continued to express stock values in eighths and sixteenths of a dollar, as though Jefferson's decimal version had never supplanted the old Spanish kind.

Taking the long view, Adams was not inclined to recommend any urgent changes. According to his report, the existing system was chaotic but he could

not see any practical advantage in changing to a decimal system. "A glance of the eye is sufficient to divide material substances into successive half, fourth, eighth and sixteenth. . . . But divisions of fifth and tenth parts are among the most difficult that can be performed without the aid of calculation."