World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement

Adams considered the metric system “a new power, offered to man, incomparably greater than that which he has acquired by the new agency which he has given to steam. It is in design the greatest invention of human ingenuity since that of printing

Still, it tied a standard—the yard—to a natural phenomenon, the seconds pendulum, so that in case the existing standard were destroyed, it could be re-created

The basic names—meter, liter (a cubic decimeter), and gram (defined as the weight of a cubic centimeter of pure water at the temperature of melting ice)—would be used to build a comprehensive nomenclature, with prefixes to denominate ten, hundred, and thousand, and tenth, hundredth, and thousandth

They soon adopted the name “meter” for the basic length unit, stemming from the Greek word metron, meaning “measure.”28 The Greek name also helped make the product sound more universal than French

There were two principal candidates. One was the “seconds pendulum,” or pendulum whose bob took a second to swing once in either direction

Scientists were finding themselves hampered by poor and inconsistent measures and by the different measures used by colleagues in different lands

Because abstract calculation is easier with decimals, scientists were quick to embrace it. Numbers acquired a new importance in science

The proliferation of new and more complex machines made precision manufacture critical. Machines with interchangeable parts—clocks in 1710, muskets in 1778—brought this demand to a new level: parts had to fit not just one machine but any machine of that type

within a short time, historically speaking (within about 200 years), virtually all these systems became consolidated into one universal system of measurement, adopted by virtually every country on the planet. It is as startling as if the entire world came to speak one language

Abuses of measurement in the modern world tend to take a different form: equating the real with the measurable, and putting too much trust in measurement to establish such fundamentally unmeasurable things as intelligence, happiness, self-esteem, educational quality, and so forth