It's great that BWMA is jumping in here, since no one in the US is doing it, but I wanted to make some comments about the BWMA's written response.
First of all, Americans don't deal with pints. We use ounces, quarts, and gallons, but pints are almost as foreign as liters. It would be better to refer to gallons instead. Second, I don't think the historical French argument is any good, because most Americans are ignorant about history and could care less. The "we need permission to examine the standards" doesn't work either becuase people know that scientists use metric and metric is on our packages already.
In my opinion, it would be much better to emphasize American sovereignty and freedom from outside control, the huge costs involved (maybe some testimonials from British businesses?) and results from a survey in the US, if anyone has taken one. These would be much more likely to affect the average American citizen.

Thanks for those notes, Bud.

Bud,

I beg to differ since when I was in school, I would get a half-pint or a pint milk carton with my lunch. Also, recently, I have noticed water bottle companies bottling half-pints of water to market to small children. Milk, cream and other things come in half-pint, pint, quart, half-gallon, and gallon sizes.

But I've just changed it to gallon!

It is coverage of NIST, BWMA wrote

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The archetype kilogram is stored in a vault near Paris - and the US requires permission from the French government to examine it. Thomas Jefferson said: "If other nations adopt this unit, they must take the word of the French mathematicians for its length…So there is an end to it!"
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A few points to ponder:

1. Thomas Jefferson died in 1826

2. In 1875 the Treaty of the Metre was draw up to which the US and UK were signatories. One of the provisions of the Treaty was that the prototype kilogram was stored on international territory under the custodianship of the International Bureau for Weights and Measures (BIPM).

I understand that each of the signatory nations has its own copy of the prototype and that there is a program of regular comparisons of the various copies around the world with the BIPM prototype.

If the BWMA stands by its original statement, then I deduce that their mindset is entrenched in the mindset of the beginning of the century before last.

You are correct; Thomas Jefferson did not refer to the kilogram. In fact, he refers to the "length"; in other words, the metre.

If Jefferson was talking about the metre, then the BMWA arguement falls apart completely.

In 1960 the metre was redefined in terms of the wavelenght of a particular light emission. It has since been redefined twice since then, the only effect of the redefinitions being that the new defintion is more accurate. AS far as the man in the street is concerned, the metre did not change with the new defintions.

This means that the prototype meter in Sevre is now a museum piece and that anybody with a decent laboratory can set up their own experiment to produce a prototype metre. They would also generate prototype yards, feet, litres, gallons (UK & US) etc from the same experiment.

Thomas Jefferson was not around in 1960. The argument does not fall apart, but it does slip a groove.