>>14131819My understanding is that in England, like a lot of countries long ago, measured length in "feet" which was about the length of a man's foot, and this was gradually standardized to a well defined consistent length. An inch is 1/12 of a foot.
None of this originally had any connection to centimeters but it turns out that an inch was very close to 2.54 cm, and people using inches typically did not care about greater precision than that, so it wouldn't screw anyone over to peg the definition of feet and inches to the meter.
By the way, a similar thing was done in terms of the metric system itself. If you look at the Wikipedia page the metric system is now mostly pegged to a natural unit system based on things like the speed of light and Planck's constant, but to maintain consistency with the old units they have to have these ugly arbitrary factors.
