Navigation
Contribute
Sister projects
From WinkyPedia, the free encyclopedia that tells you what you already knew
The metric system is a system of measurement based on the number ten. It was developed in France in the 1790s, during the French Revolution, by scientists who felt that if everything else was being changed, the inches might as well go too.[1]
Its unit of length, the metre, was defined in 1791 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, along a line through Paris. This meant that before anybody could have a metre, somebody had to go and measure the planet.
To find out exactly how long a metre was, the astronomers Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain surveyed the meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona from 1792 to 1798. It remains the longest anyone has spent measuring something in order to find out how long a ruler should be.[2]
The metric system was adopted in France by law in 1795, and platinum standards of the metre and the kilogram were placed in the national archives in 1799, where they were kept safe in case anybody forgot.
Everything in the metric system goes up in tens. The prefixes for larger units come from Greek and those for smaller units from Latin, so that kilo is Greek for a thousand and milli is Latin for a thousandth, while the metre sits in the middle and declines to take sides.
The reformers also tried decimal time, with ten hours in a day and a hundred minutes in an hour. It was made official in 1793 and suspended in 1795, after about eighteen months, or about eighteen months, depending on which clock you used.
France made the metric system compulsory in 1840. In 1875 seventeen countries signed the Metre Convention in Paris, and in 1960 the modern form was named the International System of Units. It is abbreviated SI, after its French name, which is why it does not spell IS.[3]