Even in ancient times, people had to master the art of counting and measurements. Our ancestors, trying to find a cave for themselves, were forced to measure their future shelter's length, width, and height with their height and the things that were supposed to be stored in it. Over time, people experienced an increasing need for various measurements, and measurements became more and more accurate. In their lives, people constantly have to compare and measure various quantities, such as distances. Since ancient times, various dimensions and distances were measured with one's own height, the length of arms and legs, and sometimes physical properties and abilities, their own, animals, or plants.
In other words, people use and still use "natural" measures at the everyday level, which can always be reproduced with relative accuracy and consistency. The first civilizations were centers of developing measurement methods and increasing their accuracy. With the development of human economic activity based on the division of labor and trade, precise measurements became increasingly important; without them, it would simply have been impossible to exist.
The first great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Hindustan, China, and Babylon were forced to create increasingly reliable and stable methods of determining and measuring distances, areas, weight, volume, and time. Various reference marks appeared and existed in different regions —very subjective measures, often quite exotic. Here are a few examples.
- A bull's roar is a measure of the area within which this sound is audible.
- Stadion is the distance traveled by a person with the first rays of the sun towards the sun, until it completely rises above the horizon (194 m - Babylon, 174.5 m - Egypt, 185 m - Greece).
- Sailors measured the distance with pipes, that is, the distance the ship travels when it takes the sailor to smoke a pipe. In Spain, a similar unit was a cigar; in Japan, a horseshoe, the distance a horse traveled until the straw sole tied to its hooves, which replaced a horseshoe, wore out.
The famous English inch was originally defined as the length of three grains of wheat taken from the middle of the ear. There were also more complex measures: for example, thousands of years ago in China, a hollow bamboo stick served as a unit of length, which produced a certain tone when whistled.
Often, measures with the same name differed significantly in essence. Thus, the French toise, which means "six royal steps," was originally 15 cm longer than the Swiss one. It is quite clear that under such conditions, it was impossible to ensure uniformity.
In short, there was an urgent need to adopt and produce stable prototypes of various measures. As mentioned above, many measures were of anthropometric origin or associated with a specific human work activity. They took what was at hand (or the hand itself), made a standard, and compared everything else with it.
Creation and establishment of the metric system of units
Around the 17th century, with the development of the exact sciences, scientists began to understand that the huge number of measures hindered economic and technical progress.
The first practical step towards uniformity was creating the metric system - the international decimal system of units.
The foundations of decimal counting were laid in ancient times, which is quite natural, because a person has ten fingers on their hands. However, the official birth of the decimal scale of length measurements is considered to be 1670, when it was proposed by the French mathematician and astronomer Gabriel Mouton. Five years later, the Italian architect and optician Tito Livio Burattini, who worked in Poland, proposed to adopt the length of a pendulum that counts 3600 oscillations per hour as a universal unit of linear measurements. By oscillation, he meant the movement of the load from one extreme point to the other; in modern terminology, this means the length of a pendulum with a half-period of one second. He called it the universal meter (Metro Cattolico).
If we use the formula for the period of an ideal pendulum and substitute the value of the acceleration of gravity, say, at the latitude of someplace, Burattini's standard differs in length from today's meter by only about half a centimeter. In practice, this method is unsuitable since a pendulum (with the same length) swings with a different period in different places on the globe.
Similar ideas were put forward by the Royal Society of London in 1660 and by the French astronomer Jean Picard in 1668. However, Burattini was the first to realize that a universal unit of length should not be defined by simple agreement, but based on a natural and reliably reproducible standard.
Ultimately, the
metric system became the brainchild of the French Revolution. The new Parisian authorities realized the need to bring order to the medieval units of measurement (the number of which reached an incredible number) and to adopt a single national system of measures and weights. Thus, on March 9, 1790, Charles Maurice Talleyrand, later a famous diplomat and then Bishop of Autun, proposed a plan for its creation to the National Assembly, which the deputies adopted.
The name "meter" (from the Greek metron - measure) was invented in 1790 by the Parisian mathematics teacher Le Blond. On March 19, 1791, the Academic Commission of Weights and Measures, consisting of the stars of French science Lagrange, Laplace, Borda, Monge and Condorcet, chose one ten-millionth of a quadrant of the Paris meridian as the basic unit of length and recommended measuring the length of the arc of the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona at the longitude of Paris.
Geodetic measurements of the meridian began in 1792 and lasted until 1798. In 1793, a temporary meter was introduced, calculated based on previous geodetic measurements. The royal jeweler Etienne Lenoir made the first standard from copper.
Scientists from Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland were involved in data processing, and in the spring of 1799, an official standard of length appeared, which differed only slightly from the planned value, and the temporary meter of 1793 was more accurate! Lenoir was again entrusted with the production of standards from platinum bars with a cross-section of 25.3 x 4 mm, and on June 22, 1799, the best of them (the error did not exceed 0.001%) was ceremoniously handed over to the Republican Archives for storage.
For more than 80 years, the archive meter was the only standard in the world. On May 20, 1875, representatives of 17 countries (including Russia) signed the Metre Convention in Paris and established several interstate metrological organizations.
In 1877, the London firm Johnson, Matthey, and Co. produced several platinum-iridium X-section rulers, one of which was only 6 microns shorter than the archive meter (it was used as a temporary standard). In 1882, 30 more rulers were made, among which was an almost exact copy of the archive meter.
In 1889, the First General Conference on Weights and Measures decided to consider the length of this ruler at a temperature of 0 °C as the metric unit of length.
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