But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. Live TV. This Day In History. Gabriel Mouton , a church vicar in Lyons, France, is considered by many to be the founding father of the metric system. In , Mouton proposed a decimal system of measurement that French scientists would spend years further refining.
As a convenience the system would be decimal based, with larger and smaller multiples of each unit arrived at by dividing and multiplying by 10 and its powers. The standard it represented was to be constructed so as to equal a fraction of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Indicative of the difficulties surround adoption of the new system, a survey team charged with measuring the arc of the earth aroused such suspicion that they were harassed and even jailed by local officials as they went about their work.
Napoleon himself would even ban the system before it was officially adopted by the French government.
The U. Congress declared the system lawful in commerce throughout the nation in Twenty years earlier, the French made use of the system compulsory.
But one suspected. A frequent complaint in the cahiers, or notebooks of desiderata brought by representatives of the people to the meeting of the Estates General in , was that 'the nobles' measure waxes larger year by year. These same representatives castigated the oppressive confusion of customary measures as barbaric, ridiculous, obscurantist, gothic, and revolting, and demanded an end to them, and the establishment of a system of unchanging and verifiable weights and measures throughout the country, or at least throughout their region.
Many urged that the King's measure, the royal foot, be made the law of the land. Sharpers and crooks whose practices were not sanctioned by ancient rights and wrongs and middlemen acting in analogy to money changers opposed the rationalization that menaced their livelihood.
Talleyrand 's concept was for the adoption of a brand new basic standard, ' derived from nature ' pris dans la nature and therefore acceptable to all nations. Talleyrand further suggested that the French National Assembly, the English Parliament, and the Royal Society of London should undertake preliminary work towards this objective jointly. He wrote: Perhaps this scientific collaboration for an important purpose will pave the way for political collaboration between the two nations.
He then made a speech to the British House of Commons proposing extensive measurement reform. His report to the Assembly included a detailed analysis of the extremely muddled state of French weights and measures. Talleyrand proposed to the National Assembly a decimal system of stable, unvarying and simple measurement units. At Talleyrand 's suggestion, the French National Assembly adopted this new measuring system.
Louis XVI authorised scientific investigations aimed at reform of all French weights and measures and these investigations led to the development of the 'decimal metric system' as the legal measurement system, firstly in France with the passage of several laws mostly in the s, and then in the rest of the world. Talleyrand also suggested that the Academy of Sciences in Paris collaborate with the Royal Society of London in defining the new measuring unit.
A French politician, La Rochefoucault , had this to say in the National Assembly in support of Talleyrand 's proposal: We cannot make enough haste over promulgating this decree, which should bring about fraternal relations between France and England. As a result, even though it was in the middle of the French revolution, the National Assembly of France requested the French Academy of Sciences to deduce an invariable standard for all the measures and all the weights and to prepare a report on the development of a system of measurement for France and for the world.
The French National Assembly then sent delegates to Britain, Spain and the USA to propose cooperation in developing a universal system of units for measurement.
However, subsequent historians have not been able to find such a letter in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Thomas Jefferson wrote Thomas Jefferson 's report carried considerable influence in the Congress of the USA as he was the first Secretary of State of the USA for President George Washington , but no official action was taken and the Congress passed no legislation relating to weights and measures as a result of Jefferson 's report.
Jefferson 's report used some of the scientific investigations aimed at reform of the French weights and measures but it varied in the detail. Jefferson 's proposals also had a remarkable similarity to the design for a ' universal measure ' outlined by John Wilkins in This conjecture seems more likely when we compare Wilkins ' plan for length with that of Jefferson.
Jefferson defined a standard length using a seconds pendulum then he wrote: Let the foot be divided into 10 inches; the inch into 10 lines; and the line into 10 points. Let 10 feet make a decad; 10 decads one rood; 10 roods a furlong; and 10 furlongs a mile.
And there are many other parallels. In many respects Jefferson's plan might have been taken straight from John Wilkins' essay with only slight changes to the names of the various components of the plan and a few minor differences.
For example Jefferson suggested a pendulum that had a rod instead of a string. Jefferson was a very keen book collector and I, and several very helpful librarians, have searched many catalogs of his extensive collections. The first part of Jefferson 's plan proposed the adoption of a universal length based on the seconds pendulum, measured at 45 degrees North latitude at sea level and the changing of existing old English units to this new universal measure.
The second part of Jefferson 's plan proposed the use of a decimal system as a basis for dividing and multiplying the seconds pendulum unit to reduce Originally established to preserve international standards, the BIPM promotes the uniformity of seven international units of measurement: the metre, the kilogram, the second, the ampere, the kelvin, the mole and the candela.
It is the home of the master platinum standard metre bar that was used to carefully calibrate copies, which were then sent out to various other national capitals. In the s, the BIPM redefined the metre in terms of light, making it more precise than ever. And now, defined by universal laws of physics, it was finally a measure truly based on nature. The small, cylindrical weight cast in platinum-iridium alloy is also, like the metre, due to be redefined in terms of nature — specifically the quantum-mechanical quantity known as the Planck constant — by the BIPM this November.
As he explained the principle of the Kibble balance and the way in which a mass is weighed against the force of a coil in a magnetic field, I marvelled at the latest scientific engineering before me, the precision and personal effort of all the people who have been working on the kilogram project since it began in and are now very close to achieving their goal. As with the 18th-Century meridian project, defining measurement continues to be one of our most important and difficult challenges.
As I walked further up the hill of the public park that surrounds the BIPM and looked out at the view of Paris, I thought about the structure of measurement underlying the whole city. The machinery used for construction; the trade and commerce happening in the city; the exact quantities of drugs, or radiation for cancer therapy, being delivered in the hospitals.
What started with the metre formed the basis of our modern economy and led to globalisation. It enabled high-precision engineering and continues to be essential for science and research, progressing our understanding of the universe. We regret the error and have updated the text accordingly.
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