Yes and no. The English system is one of many systems based on the Roman system. D’Artagnan and his friends were quite familiar with the pied and the pouce, the livre and the once.
Inches and pounds were normalized in 1959, but volumes were quite different. There are also differences in the default meanings of “hundredweight” and “ton”, but the words “long” and “short” can be used to specify.
The true story is far more complex.
From the North Pole to the Equator.
The gram is an historic anomaly. The original standard mass was the grave, equal to one kilogram, but the word grave became politically incorrect (it sounded too much like German graf), and the system was reworked to eliminate the word.
There is one other reason to go to metric—I still remember the years of time wasted in elementary school so-called “math” classes teaching the near chaos of the US and Imperial systems.
This is a very important point. Aside from international compatibility, the biggest advantage of metric is that conversions are easy. But the average person doesn’t do conversions–no one cares how many cubic inches are in a gallon, because gallons are for milk while inches are for waistlines. No one cares how many feet are in a mile because miles are for cars while feet are for room dimensions. I’m not sure it was entirely obvious to early humans that the concept of distance is exactly the same whether you are talking about horses or oceans, nor am I sure that the confusion has entirely evaporated.
The only exception I can think of is the kitchen, where it would be nice to know how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, or whatever. But this is mostly only important for recipe multiplication and is infrequent enough that most are content to simply measure out 16 teaspoons of sugar, say.
I don’t think the problem is limited to the English system. I’d very much like to see an international survey testing if people know that a liter fills a 10 centimeter cube, or that a cubic meter of water weighs a tonne.