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Measurement artifact meaning aba4/18/2023 ![]() ![]() The measure of volume, the liter, would be the volume of a cube of distilled water whose dimensions were 1/1,000 of a cubic meter. The measure of distance, the meter (derived from the Greek word metron, meaning “a measure”), would be 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the North Pole and the equator, with that line passing through Paris, of course. The new system would be a decimal system, that is, based on 10 and its powers. A year later, they emerged with a set of recommendations. To do this, the French Academy of Sciences established a council of preeminent scientists and mathematicians, Jean-Charles de Borda, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Gaspard Monge and Nicolas de Condorcet, to study the problem in 1790. ![]() Rather, the French sought to create a system that would endure “for all times, for all peoples.” The invention of the metric system at the end of the 18th century in revolutionary France was the result of a lengthy effort to establish such a universal system of measurement, one that wasn’t based on bodily dimensions that varied from person to person or from place to place. You could build your own house using such measures, and plots of land could be roughly surveyed, but if you wanted to buy or sell anything based on length or area, collect proper taxes and duties, build more advanced weapons and machines with interchangeable parts, or perform any kind of scientific investigation, you needed a universal standard. This was fine so long as accuracy and precision were not an issue. This measure further depended upon the crop being grown: For example, an acre of wheat was a different size than an acre of barley. In some places, the area of farmland was even measured in time, such as how much land a man, or a man with an ox, could plow in a day. For instance, in England, for the purposes of commerce, the inch was conceived as the length of three barleycorns laid end to end.Ī unit of length for measuring land, a rod, was the length of 16 randomly selected men’s feet, and multiples of it defined an acre. ![]() The Romans and other cultures from around the world such as those in India and China standardized their units, but length measurements in Europe were still largely based on variable things until the 18th century. However, the Roman mile was not quite as long as the modern version. (On the other hand, the yard did not derive from a pace but from, among other things, the length of King Henry I of England’s outstretched arm.) Mille passus in Latin, or 1,000 paces, is where the English word “mile” comes from. For example, the pace-one left step plus one right step-is approximately a meter or yard. Later length measurements used by the Romans (who had taken them from the Greeks, who had taken them from the Babylonians and Egyptians) and passed on into Europe generally were based on the length of the human foot or walking and multiples and subdivisions of that. ![]()
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