Inching Toward Metric

Britain has buckled to its European Union partners and banished its 800-year-old imperial weights and measures system, established by King Edward I, in favor of metrics. Retailers face fines and prison if they refuse to adopt liters and meters. Draught beer will still be sold in pints, and road signs will be in miles, but a 2-by-4 board is now a 5.08-by-10.16 cm plank. More than 60,000 retailers were ordered to convert 200,000 scales at a cost of $54 million. After the new system went into effect, Bruce Robertson, right, set up a “Pound of Flesh” stall outside his store in southwest England, to sell fruit, while a scoreboard kept a running total of his metric offenses. He broke the law 200 times, but was not fined.