This article on the metric system in the US is great.
I’ve read a lot of history but I’d never heard the story about pirates capturing a French scientist who was on his way to bring a meter and a kilogram to the US at the request of Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was a very interested in a new system of measures to replace the crazy quilt of measures we inherited from the UK but the scientist never got there. Jefferson had established the decimal system for money and likely would have done the same thing for measures. By the time the information about the metric system got to the US, the political landscape had changed and the rest is history.