2012/1/17



Wired - The Search for a More Perfect Kilogram

This is an interesting article and well worth reading, but this part stood out to me:

Back then, their intervention was sorely needed. The reigning standard of length in Paris, the toise, was defined by an iron rod embedded in a courthouse staircase in 1668. Outside Paris, chaos ruled: There were some 250,000 local units of weights and measures in France alone, many of them sharing the same names, a fact that ensured that the only constant was confusion.

Europe really was a backwater. In China, the Qin Dynasty unified weights and measures back in the third century BC.

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  1. carlsensei posted this

#Wired #weights and measures #Qin dynasty #metric system #Europe was a backwater