---
title: "History of the metric system"
chunk: 3/10
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metric_system"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:39:48.437355+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In 1790, a panel of five leading French scientists was appointed by the Académie des sciences to investigate weights and measures. They were Jean-Charles de Borda, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Gaspard Monge, and Nicolas de Condorcet. 
Over the following year, the panel, after studying various alternatives, made a series of recommendations regarding a new system of weights and measures, including that it should have a decimal radix, that the unit of length should be based on a fractional arc of a quadrant of the Earth's meridian, and that the unit of weight should be that of a cube of water whose dimension was a decimal fraction of the unit of length. The proposals were accepted by the French Assembly on 30 March 1791.
Following acceptance, the Académie des sciences was instructed to implement the proposals. The Académie broke the tasks into five operations, allocating each part to a separate working group:

Measuring the difference in latitude between Dunkirk and Barcelona and triangulating between them
Measuring the baselines used for the survey
Verifying the length of the second pendulum at 45° latitude.
Verifying the weight in a vacuum of a given volume of distilled water.
Publishing conversion tables relating the new units of measure to the existing units of measure.
The panel decided that the new measure of length should be equal to one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator (Earth quadrant), measured along the Paris meridian.
Using Jean Picard's survey of 1670 and Jacques Cassini's survey of 1718, a provisional value of 443.44 lignes was assigned to the metre which, in turn, defined the other units of measure.
While Méchain and Delambre were completing their survey, the commission had ordered a series of platinum bars to be made based on the provisional metre. When the final result was known, the bar whose length was closest to the meridional definition of the metre would be selected.
After 1792, the name of the original defined unit of mass, "gramme", which was too small to serve as a practical realisation for many purposes, was adopted, the new prefix "kilo" was added to it to form the name "kilogramme". Consequently, the kilogram is the only SI base unit that has an SI prefix as part of its unit name.
A provisional kilogram standard was made and work was commissioned to determine the precise mass of a cubic decimetre (later to be defined as equal to one litre) of water.
The regulation of trade and commerce required a "practical realisation": a single-piece, metallic reference standard that was one thousand times more massive that would be known as the grave. This mass unit defined by Lavoisier and René Just Haüy had been in use since 1793. This new, practical realisation would ultimately become the base unit of mass. On 7 April 1795, the gramme, upon which the kilogram is based, was decreed to be equal to "the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to a cube of one hundredth of a metre, and at the temperature of the melting ice". Although the definition of the kilogramme specified water at 0 °C—a highly stable temperature point—it was replaced with the temperature at which water reaches maximum density. This temperature, about 4 °C, was not accurately known, but one of the advantages of the new definition was that the precise Celsius value of the temperature was not actually important. The final conclusion was that one cubic decimetre of water at its maximum density was equal to 99.92072% of the mass of the provisional kilogram.
On 7 April 1795, the metric system was formally defined in French law. It defined six new decimal units:

The mètre, for length—defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris
The are (100 m2) for area [of land]
The stère (1 m3) for volume of firewood
The litre (1 dm3) for volumes of liquid
The gramme, for mass—defined as the mass of one cubic centimetre of water
The franc, for currency.
Historical note: only the metre and (kilo)gramme defined here went on to become part of later metric systems. Litres and to a lesser extent hectares (100 ares, or 1 hm2) are still in use, but are not SI units.
Decimal multiples of these units were defined by Greek prefixes: "myria-" (10,000), "kilo-" (1000), "hecto-" (100), and  "deka-" (10) and submultiples were defined by the Latin prefixes "deci-" (0.1), "centi-" (0.01), and "milli-" (0.001).
For purposes of commerce, units and prefixed-units of weight (mass) and capacity (volume) were prependable by the binary multipliers "double-" (2) and "demi-" (1⁄2), as in double-litre, demi-litre; or double-hectogramme, demi-hectogramme, etc.
The 1795 draft definitions enabled provisional copies of the kilograms and metres to be constructed.

=== Meridional survey ===

The task of surveying the meridian arc, which was estimated to take two years, fell to Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre. The task eventually took more than six years (1792–1798) with delays caused not only by unforeseen technical difficulties but also by the convulsed period of the aftermath of the Revolution. Apart from the obvious nationalistic considerations, the Paris meridian was also a sound choice for practical scientific reasons: a portion of the quadrant from Dunkirk to Barcelona (about 1000 km, or one-tenth of the total) could be surveyed with start- and end-points at sea level, and that portion was roughly in the middle of the quadrant, where the effects of the Earth's oblateness were expected to be the largest.
The project was split into two parts—the northern section of 742.7 km from the Belfry, Dunkirk to Rodez Cathedral which was surveyed by Delambre and the southern section of 333.0 km from Rodez to the Montjuïc Fortress, Barcelona which was surveyed by Méchain.