When was metric invented

See the Tool. See the Collection. See the Lesson. October Photo Credit: Clipart. The French government officially adopted the system in , but only after more than a century of sometimes contentious bickering over its value and suspicion surrounding the intent of metric proponents. 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. In the period of to , there was a strong movement in the United States toward widespread use of the metric system.

That initiative lost momentum, and the nation continues to use a dual system of measurement even though the system is now employed widely throughout the world. These prefixes denote powers of ten, so that metric units are always divided into tens, hundreds, thousands, etc.

The metric units were defined in an elegant way unlike any traditional units of measure. The Earth itself was selected as the measuring stick. The meter was defined to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole. The liter was to be the volume of one cubic decimeter, and the kilogram was to be the mass of a liter of pure water.

It didn't turn out quite like this, because the scientific methods of the time were not quite up to the task of measuring these quantities precisely, but the actual metric units come very close to the design. The metric system was first proposed in It was adopted by the French revolutionary assembly in , and the first metric standards a standard meter bar and kilogram bar were adopted in There was considerable resistence to the system at first, and its use was not made compulsory in France until The first countries to actually require use of the metric system were Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, in Around a strong movement began among scientists, engineers, and businessmen in favor of a international system of weights and measures.

The scientific and technical revolution was well underway and a global economy was developing. The need for uniformity in measurement was becoming obvious.

Furthermore, the metric system was the only real choice available. The only possible competitor, the British Imperial system, was so closely tied to the British Empire it was not even acceptable to the Americans, let alone to non-English speakers.

Between and the metric system made rapid progress.