Metric System
ALTERNATIVE NAME/S: None
DETAILS/DESCRIPTION: In 1790 the decision was made by King Louis XVI of France to establish a single common measuring system to rationalize the dozens of different systems in use throughout France at the time. To do so he recruited a team of scientists including Laplace, Lavoisier, Monge, Condorcet and Lagrange.
The decision was that the metric system should be based on the meter, which was to be equal to one ten-millionth of the distance from North Pole to equator. The meter was subdivided into centimeters and millimeters. This was then used to define weights, based on the definition of a cubic meter of water (‘liter’) as a ‘kilogram.’
The system did away with the thousands of contemporary different European weights and measures, replacing them with one universal system. With slight modification it exists today: the meter is now as the now is defined as the distance travelled by light in an absolute vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second.
95% of the world’s populations live in countries which use the system (major exceptions being the U.S. and the U.K.).
ONELINER: The metric system is a a basic set of units of measurement
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Encyclopedia Britannica
Dictionary of Scientific Biography