It also didn't help that the king was famous for being (to put it lightly) an unreasonable prick, and this system being devised by the French certainly didn't gain any bonus points.īut with the storming of the Bastille and the start of the French Revolution, there was an opportunity to show the world this new standard of measurement as a solid proof of concept. King George III was of the opinion that the British Imperial System worked just fine, and they didn't need to switch. When the metric system was first introduced, there was a lot of hesitancy from other nations to adopt these new standards, particularly from the British. Get the best of Cracked sent directly to your inbox! SIGN ME UP 5 A Lot of French Aristocrats Had to Die for the Metric System to Really Take Off Here, take this end and walk to the north pole." Gd_project/Shutterstock "I think this tape measure might be a little off. So, they scaled that formula up by a thousand, a 10cm X 10cm X 10cm cube, and used the weight of that water to create the first prototype standard of the kilogram in 1889 that the world has been calibrating their scales to ever since. They defined the gram by the amount of pure water that would fit inside one cubic centimeter at its maximum density (4 ☌elcius) and at standard atmospheric pressure (sea level). It was just a happy coincidence that the line also ran right through Paris, and the scientists were all French.įrom that one standard for length, they were able to create standards for weight and volume. Why the Prime Meridian? Well, the curvature of the Earth along that particular longitude has the shortest distance from the North Pole to the Equator due to the fact that the Earth is more of an oblong spheroid than perfectly round. ![]() One metre (spelled METER here in America for no real reason other than screw all y'all) was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator at 0° longitude, a.k.a. ![]() So, in creating the metric system, they wanted to base it on something that would remain constant no matter what: the size of the Earth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |