Bureau, THE metric bureau

Posted on by wanderer

The humble metric system, as we have seen, was not established immediately. The legacy of the metric that I want to focus on is how it came to be, and what bureau was created to establish, motitor, standarize and update the metric.

The metric gathered support little by little from 1795, until, by 1875, the infamous Metre Convention, with the US being one of its founders! made it the International standard we all know and love, well at least one of these two is true.

The convention did not just stop at pushing for an international, standarised, metric system, no, they created one of the first bureaus. That we will be evaluating for now.

The 1875 one is the Weights and Measures: the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, or in its original french Bureau . They also established a conference (General Conference on Weights and Measures) and a committee (International Committee for Weights and Measures). Again, more on bureaus later, and committees, and conferences, and…

But why, by 1875, was it needed for a French mostassaf to be in charge of an international bureau at all? This is the interesting question. What is relevant for the metric system is not the use of units for measurement set by a national administration, but the fact that it implanted the idea that we all must use it and be raised in it.

The french Weights and Measures mostassaf did not came out of nowhere. Going back to the scientific homogenisation, we need to add the germans to the mix.

By 1841, 28 measurements of the magnetic field of the Earth where taken over a six year period. These measurements, all over the planet, where centralised by the “Magnetic Society”, or  Magnetische Verein in the original german. This was a society not a bureau, yet. As a society, the compromise was just to gather, standarise and share the measurements, so they could be useful across the planet. There was an extra benefit for endeabour, navigation. Like with the making of accurate clocks to measure longitude, an accurate description of the magnetic field allowed better seafaring transits, as the north and south magnetic poles of the Earth do not coincide with the geographical poles of the planet. Actually, the magnetic ones have a tendency to wander, quite fast indeed (hundreds of kilometres per decade), and even flip! (north becoming south). This was know for decades, or centuries, but was Gauss who in the 1830s started measuring its strength, and latter instigated the creation of the society, with international aims and ambitions.

Later on, the also german based Mitteleuropäische Gradmessung (Central European Arc Measuremen), linked with the need to measure the meridian to estimate the circunference of the Earth, and hence, the metre, was created on 1862. Interestingly, the Mitteleuropäische Gradmessung still exists in the form of the International Association of Geodesy, again, an association and not a bureau. By 1859 it was known that several meridians had not the same length, and that as measurement techniques would advance, the nominal definition of the metre would constantly change, even if so slightly.

A Catalan office —well aware of the Barcelona lie— Calos Ibañez e Ibañez de Ebro, was in charge of the International Association of Geodesy when in 1875 the Meter Convention was stablished. At the time of Carlos running these two pioneering international organisms, these were planned as contributing to increase precision in navigation, cartography and geography, as well as the emerging railways and telegraphs. Railways and telegraphs will come hunting us, but that’s for later.

So, despite the logic of unification being a concept from the particular French Revolution — which linked the metric with revolutionary ideas to make their political movement of decapitating kings (and many others) universal — the universalisation cached up four generations later, and, for the first time the particular Catalan mostassaf was not to be for a town, or state, but for all the planet!

From this story what I want to emphasise is that the importance is the base of knowledge of the standard, more than the standard itself, whatever it is.

How a continuously fighting world of nations came to decide that they could trust a base of knowledge? Moreover, how for the first time —unlike with mathematical, temporal, musical, and punctuational spontaneous standardisation — these nations decided to bureaucratise the process of standardisation with scientific geeks at the front of the first modern international institutions. This how process boils down to write laws that would be shared across borders and mutually understood, plus trust that the mostassaf would be available and willing to keep, share and not abuse its privative and privileged knowledge. Again, remember that the term mostassaf comes from an Arab religious figure of moral and measurement accountability.

So what makes the metric stand? Truly, a handful of things:
i) It was the first one designed from the get-go to be universal;
ii) it was based on natural units accessible, in principle, to anyone who had the time to finance the measure;
iii) it was easy to learn, aligning with mathematical notation, already quite universal and on base 10;
iv) it was set to work with technical and scientific communities;
v) the scientific communities were expanding, encompassing industrial and geodesical needs for better instruments, better measurements, faster and easier comparisons and sharing of technical information and better land and sea surveys for better administrative oversight (more on administrations later);
vi) its creators also kinda pushed for it to be adopted universally, following the spirit of revolution;
vii) there were not many alternatives at the time, to be honest.

Let us look at the last option (vii), alternatives? The only real contender for standard measurement used for scientific and technical applications by the end of the XIXc was the British Imperial system (still slightly kept by the US and Liberia). The imperial traces its roots to the standardisation of English measures, as designed by the 13th-century Magna Carta, but standardised by 1496, rectified in 1588 and made the British Imperial system by 1826.

We have the imperial length units. Let us look at these!. The basis is the foot, abbreviated as ft. The multiples are a yard as 3 ft, chain 3×22 ft, furlong 3×220 ft, mile 3×1760 ft, league 3x3x1760 ft. Well, it seems they were trying a base 3, but kinda gave up on it, soon. For the sub-units: twip 1/3^3×640 ft, thou 1/3×4000, barleycorn 1/3^2×4, inch 1/3×4, hand 1/3. OK, OK, kinda keeping with the basis 3 there, sometimes 4 as well, maybe inspired by the 60 for time — 3x4x5 — but also not quite. Now let us look at the distance units at sea: we have the fathom 6.0761 ft, cable 607.61 and nautical mile 6076.1… Now there is a base ten! But not much sense otherwise.

But a visual is better than thousands of words, and words of measures. Here is a side-by-side comparison of units of length in the traditional English system vs the metric one.

Comparison of English customary english and their interrelation with metric

For mass, the basic unit is the pound. Fair enough. But the shorthand for pound is lb. Yeah, we have seen that pound and livre are, in theory, referring to the same old Roman unit, but still, lb looks quite different than p or pn. Anyway, let us see its divisions: grain is 1/7000 lb, drachm is 1/256 lb, stone is 14 lb, quarter 28 lb, hundredweight 112 lb and ton 2240 lb. Little sense, but in base 12 or 60, like time, still makes no sense. For multiples it has base 14 (1, 2, 4, 800). Yet for divisions it has a basis, ehem, no consistent basis. A grain is 1/(14×500) — why 500? Well, a drachm is 1/2^8…

Sorry, I tried.

I will not even try the volume units. A beer pint is just a large half-litre drink.
Cheers to that!

The other option could have been the Burmese system. Myanmar still has traditional Burmese units of measurement. The Burmese system maybe has been maintained, in part, because for mass and volume it follows a neat base-two system, in which each unit is a factor 2 bigger than the previous — the metric being a factor 10 between units. Unfortunately, this is not the case for length and area; no, for length the Burmese system is a mess. For example, as of 2010, the state used miles to describe the length of roads, square feet for the size of houses, square kilometres for land area in cities, acres for agricultural areas, kilometres for the dimensions of the country. Still, when I was travelling there in 2015 I did check if they were the US of Asia for the metric, but for reasonable driving they did use km for distances to places and km/h as road speed limit indicators.

So, form the above list, let us focus on points (iv) to (vi): the need, willingness and expansion of technical and scientific domains beyond national borders (more on nations later).

The expansion of the metric is interlinked with these technical and national advancements and ended with some of the first bureaus on the planet.

The republican French, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Revolution, did a technical and industrial fair in 1798. This was not much international, as they were in the middle of intense wars, still not called Napoleonic. At the exposition they showed devices demonstrating the new metric system of metres, grams and litres, and, following European fair traditions, they had prizes for outstanding products, mostly fabrics and textiles, but now including innovative technical and industrial devices. One of them was the precursor of the modern pencil, and pencil colours.

They held three more expositions until 1806, and then new ones shall happen every 3 years; this allowed for enough new inventions, geographical explorations, arts, sciences and devices to be developed between events. But by 1809 France was indeed in the middle of the Napoleonic wars.

By 1819 the now French kingdom restarted the expositions, which happened roughly every 4 years.

Then the Kingdom of France decided to revolutionise a bit again and become the kingdom “of the French”. Notice the difference; it will be important later on. Then they decided to make an exposition every 5 years, starting in 1834.

The 1844 one was quite a success internationally, spawning similar fairs in other nations — Bern (1845), Madrid (1845), Saint Petersburg (1848), Lisbon (1849). Then in 1849 there would be the last national exhibition, as in 1851 the British did their Great Crystal Palace Exhibition, which for the first time had the dimension of a world, and not national, fair. From there on, world exhibitions would happen regularly, a bit like the Olympic Games now, and cities would compete with each other to host the event.

These World Fairs, or “the Expos” for us old enough to remember them being a thing, initially were great opportunities for showcasing the most advanced scientific and technological discoveries of the time. This was especially important in an era when more efficient and powerful steam engines, steel, locomotives, rails, and later electricity and telegraph were taking over the European nations and their colonies. In these events, industrialists and scientists from around the world could meet and agree on stuff.

That stuff, my friends, was the metric system, which by the end of the Napoleonic Empire, like decimal time, had gone down the drain. Napoleon reintroduced the customary units, but retained the metre and kilogram for these units to be compared against. The metric systen was also taught at schools and academia. It was simple to teach, as we have seen.

Meanwhile, the metre lived on in other states that were under the influence of the French Empire and retained the metric system, like the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Piedmont, later the Italian kingdom.

And the US, of all places, had a central role for the metre. The Coastal Survey Office, since its inception in 1807, but really by 1836, standardised all the coastal measurements with the metre as its basis.

And even nations that escaped Napoleon, like Portugal, by 1814 adopted the metre, though retaining the traditional names when needed.

Spain, as we have seen with the Catalan measures, had a diverse set of systems. But by 1849 decided to standardise measurements with the metre and kilogram, and by 1851 decided to conduct a survey of the state. The Spanish bureau of measures also adopted and developed new measurement tools to compensate for thermal expansion of the standard metre rods. That made the use of the metre more precise and more manageable. Then it provided standard metres to the Egyptians, and the standard was used throughout France and the German Confederation.

On the first French Universal Exposition in 1855, the Swiss had finished, and presented, their official map with the metre adopted as unit of length, and this was awarded a medal.

Moreover, the Congress of Statistics was held in Paris at the same time as the exposition. There, statisticians, probably tired of wasting time making conversions of units, and probably not happy with the metre being kept by a France-based mostassaf, decided to settle on a uniform decimal system of measures, weights and currencies.

Again, the US pushed for the metric system by 1866. One of the bases of precision balances was in grams and kilograms. In 1866 (made in Bangor, Maine, where I’m writing this now) the legislative organ passed the Metric Act, which defined the metric system in terms of customary units rather than with reference to the international prototype. Interestingly, this anchored the customary measurement units to that of the metre, even if it legislated the other way around.

Then, at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, again in Paris, the statistician geeks formalised the universalisation desire with the creation of a Committee for Weights and Measures and Monies. Now it would not be the French revolutionaries calling for universalisation, but a bunch of geeks with the ears of wealthy industrialists interested in easier technical standards.

That committee finally, after the Franco-Prussian War, created the Bureau, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, with two governing organs and the headquarters. The newly created German and Italian states already adopted the metric system as their standard. These nations now were part of the bureau, which was tasked to facilitate the standardisation of weights and measures around the world. The bureau had three parts: a conference as a forum for representatives of member states; a committee of metrologists as an advisory board of high standing; the headquarters as the meeting place and laboratory facilities that inform the decision and advisory bodies for decision-making. Corporations, interestingly, often work similarly to that: the conference would be the shareholders’ meeting, and the committee the board of directors.

The Catalan Carlos Ibáñez e Ibáñez de Ibero — the head of the Spanish survey and national measures institute, and maybe familiar with the mostassaf concept — was one of the main pushers of an international standard based on the metre. By the bureau’s creation, he was made the initial president of the committee, the Permanent Committee of the International Metre Commission (confusingly, also named International Committee for Weights and Measures and General Conference on Weights and Measures; do not ask). Being Catalan of origin, Ibáñez, since 1853, also impulsed the remeasurement of the “Barcelona lie”, that is, the Paris meridian, extending the measurement from the Shetland to the Sahara. That effort, and other European meridian measurements, awarded him the first presidency of the International Geodetic Association by 1867.

The 1875 Metre Convention put the decision-making of the standard measurement of the planet in a bunch of nation states’ hands. The original signatories being Argentina, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ottoman Empire, United States of America (yeah, you have seen it well, US is here!), and Venezuela (which no longer ratifies the Metre Convention).

Metre Convention on the planet. Dark green, member states; light green, associate states; red, former member states; light red, former associate states.

Interestingly enough, the metre is also not completely dominant in the UK, where the standards for the metric system, and the metal piece that defined the kilogram for 160 years, were made.

In the US there is also the fun fact that, unlike the UK, industry is not forced to use the metric system for all their products, despite being one of the original seventeen signatory nations to the Metre Convention.

Therefore, when NASA asked its suppliers to work with the metric system, but one of its suppliers, who procured thrusters for a probe to Mars, worked with customary units of pound-force-seconds, the result of such an integration of two different systems was that the poor Mars Climate Orbiter probe simply went on its sweet way to Mars just to descend to about 57 kilometres above Mars’ surface, instead of its planned orbit at about 150 kilometres. At that height, and without enough angular velocity, and with the drag of the tenuous Martian atmosphere, the orbiter simply produced a nice flame in the atmosphere.

That is the price of not having a unified unit system.

So being the first, and not having many alternatives, plus being relatively memorable and accessible (had to knock at the Parisian mostassaf from time to time, but was a cool person), made the whole system go global, or pay the price if not.

The metric system simply illustrates how national administrations and gatherings of world representatives agree to standards. In the metric case this quasi-standard emerged through technological need, the ease of communication that allowed repeated forums where actors interested in standardisation and sharing could gather and lobby in a uniform way, the relative ease of the new system and its spirit of universalisation, and a specific individual with the right connections and maybe aware of the connection between moral and measurement accountability through an old mostassaf legacy in our lands.

If we compare the metric to the other standards that we have seen — mathematical and musical notation, francas, timekeeping and punctuation — all of these share similarities. Technical advancements for clocks creation and the need of better measurements for navigation and trains in the case of timekeeping; more communication, new instruments and bigger orchestras for music; economic interest for francas; facilitation and economic dissemination for punctuation. With the exception of the calendar, none of these standards had behind them the will of the states or nations. And even the legislation for calendars happened at a customary and slow attrition, state by state, without an international gathering, convention or bureau leading it.

Like the weights and shekel 3000 years ago, we can look at more modern cases of this seemingly spontaneous standardisation originating by the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th. For example, if you ever used headphones, the connector, or “jack”, to the sound device might have always been the same diameter 1⁄4 in and shape, or have only two–three standards (1/8). Another piece quite familiar to most of us nowadays is the keyboard I am typing this on, which is an almost international standard, called QWERTY, named after the order of the letters on the first keys’ row. Looking elsewhere, the bicycle chain is 0.5 in between pins and 5⁄16 in for roller diameter. The size of cargo containers, 8 ft wide by 8 ft 6 in high and 20 or 40 ft long. Yeah, metric did not make it for jack, bikes and cargo, damn.

More on the emergence of these (and other) standards later.

What we can infer, however, is that standardisation follows a mixed route of informal conformity by useful means of exchange, plus a forcing pace by institutional action. Then, in an interconnected, and colonially dominated, world, the metric system in particular shows the first, or one of the first instances, of how slow attrition to shared standards could be hastened by gatherings and lobbying committees. And how that commitment results in autonomous bureaus that horn in their task. In the experience of THE Metric, the legislative power of national institutions could be weaponised to steer reluctant populations that were happy with their local traditions and units, however clumsy, to adopt new and bureaucratised standards countries away, instead of their local mostassaf. Or shield them, as in the US, however clumsy. A new state-sponsored universal education could get away with old traditions by educating children in new, maybe more memorable, systems.

With the dreaded metric we can see how all the pieces are falling into place to have the ruleset to ask our question: what does humanity want? But before that we need to go through the emerging bureaus and other international organisms that, for now, rule, the World.

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THE Metric, system

THE Metric, system

Posted on by wanderer

And as with many things in these writings, it all starts with the French Republic, the first one, or the French Empire, the first one.

But before, we need to go back to the Babylonians, again.

There is evidence that as far as 3,000 years ago, Mesopotamian merchants established a standardised system of weights that later spread across Europe, effectively forming the first known common Afro-Eurasian market. In a study, thousands of objects used as standards of weight over the course of 2,000 years in an area from Ireland to Mesopotamia weighed nearly the same amount — between 8 and 10.5 grams.

This “spontaneous” standardisation, though, started by copying the Mesopotamian standard, called the shekel, which later became a coinage system, and now is the name for Israel’s currency.

In fact, coins are no more than a stamp into a piece of metal to say that such metal is the value that it claims to be, with the purity of the metal that the stamp issuer claims.

Basically, at some point many cultures in antiquity decided that if a certain king or organism put — insert here his or her face, or symbol, or god — onto a round and flat piece of metal, that would be enough for people to believe that such a metal piece was of such-and-such quality and mass. That is why “pound” is both a weight and a coin. It kinda worked because we still have these small pieces of metal going around in almost every place on the planet, with few counterfeit ones, and many, many faces of mostly old — often dead — dudes.

Therefore, the whole system is based on trust that all the coins are made according to the same mass and purity standard, and that such a standard is known by everybody who is using it. We will see more of the importance of trust in later chapters.

But trust is only needed for the value part of the standard. As we have seen with mathematical and musical notation, punctuation, and francas, a degree of intent and shared interest in communicating, — plus actual political and militaristic control of peoples, and some degree of prestige—, also does the trick, without much need of trust.

But for now, let us jump to the United States now that I am writing this here. Maybe people from the US, and the Myanmar government, do not especially embrace it, but children do not like the Babylonian time keeping much either. Children tend to prefer the legacy of the Republic, the French Republic, the first one.

That is, the metric system. To clarify.

The metric, with a limited set of units that follow a decimal scale, and a conventional nomenclature linking base-10 “words” to multiples (from Greek) — deca, 10, hecto 100, kilo 1000… — and divisions (from Latin) — deci 0.1, centi 0.01, mili 0.001 … — rules the world: the world’s measures (not time; time still is Babylonian, as we have seen).

Compare the French metric to the Babylonian time, with base-60 seconds and minutes, but a 24-hour day, 7-day week, 28- to 31-day months, seasons starting on the 20th or 21st of some months, and years, with some being one day longer than others. Children love to learn the metric, not so much timekeeping.

Before we had a universal measurement system, each yardstick would have a local reference to which it would be computed. For example, going to a marketplace you pour your grain into a container that would tell you how much grain you had and you could sell. Of course that depended on the actual container, and it might change marketplace to marketplace. To this day, I still find some of these containers in market squares set in stone.

But these containers for goods such as grains and olives were not straightforward to describe. For example, for volumes in Catalan-speaking lands we had this:

The quartera was equivalent to the capacity of the container [this container being the one at the market-squares] of the same name. [...]. The aimina is a very old measure that appears in a large number of documents. As submultiples [of the aimaina] there were: the measura, the sester, the cossa, the punyera, the picotí, etc. The barcella was the measure used in the [balearic] islands (where it was divided into 6 almuds or 1/6 of a quartera) and in the Valencian Country (where it was divided into 4 almuds, or 16 quarterons, or 108 mesuretes, equivalent to 1/4 a taleca, or 1/12 of the cafís, or 1/2 fanecà [also the name of a area unit equivalent to 833.3m2, or the land surface that can be cultivated with one faneca of grain ]. The barcella was also used in Tortosa, where it was equal to 3 cutxols, or 6 almuds, or 1/25 of the cafís. For forment [wheat], barley, oats, etc., the cafís is just 25  barcelles [adjusted to the edge of the container]

Did you get dizzy with that trainload of measure names, specific for each township or territory AND to which kind of good it was being measured? I did, and is my language.

This system was so complex that a profession, the mostassaf (accountant), was needed to make sure the measures were respected. The mostassaf was a profession inherited from the Muslim muḥtasib, inspector of public places and behaviour in towns. Measurement was, indeed, in need of public behaviour. Muḥtasib comes from ḥisbah, or “accountability”. Interestingly, the term also has both meanings in English: moral accountability, and how to account for economic transactions (the profession being accountant). This connection between debt and morality is deeply explored in — slightly cherry-picked and immensely thought-provoking — David Graeber’s 5000 years of dept. In the Aragonese territories the mostassaf had to keep the original measurement patterns and check that the copies had enough precision with his personal seal for the canes (sticks, length), balances (balance, weights), and all the volume units that we have seen.

What is interesting for the linguistic part is that, although these measures varied from town to town, or mostassaf to mostassaf, they were called the same. So these ‘measures’ were similar enough from one place to the neighbour that everybody agreed for that to be the standard, but not quite. Again, like with languages, the measures might have drifted the further away you went from one place, while the name itself might be the same. As I often heard in India: same same, but different.

In fact, that same same but different, and terminological mess is one of the reasons why the estimation of the size of the Earth used by Columbus was so wrong.

Part of the computations were using the measurement that Eratosthenes of Alexandria did more than 2,000 years before. His measure was about 252,000 “stadia”. But if I tell you that your dog measures 0.008 stadia, you still would not be sure of how long your dog is. For that you would need to translate it to a measure that you are familiar with. Depending on what the equivalences are, your dog could measure 0.00012 km or 95 inches.

This was the problem faced by Columbus and many of his contemporaries. Nobody really cared to pay anybody to measure, on land, the distance between Alexandria and a place south of it where there was no shadow in a well on an equinox day, the Tropic of Cancer.

These armchair thinkers simply quoted Eratosthenes, and the people who copied him over the millennia. But the Olympic games were long gone, and not many “stadion” existed as a reference. Even today, when we can measure archaeological remains of stadia and historical sources, experts argue that the unit could be anywhere between 150 and 210 metres.

Ptolemy took the lower estimation of Earth’s circumference. Later the Arabs translated previous estimations of the circumference of the Earth by Posidonius, Strabo, Hipparchus, Aryabhata and Pliny. They themselves did some extra measurements lead by Al-Khwarizmi, Al-Biruni and Al-Farghani. All of these translations and new measurements, confusingly, was converted to ‘miles’.

However, naming something the same does not mean it is the same.

‘Miles’ for the Arabs are not the ‘imperial’ ones. Moreover, something that at this point should surprise no one: the mile the arabs where using to translate previous Earth size estimates, and their new measures, has no clear conversion to modern units. An Arab mile from these text being interpreted as anywhere between 1,800 and 2,000 metres. Not so bad but still a 10% margin.

In any case, the same number of miles will be about 1/3 bigger or smaller depending on which mile it is. Same same, but different indeed.

This convoluted process ended up being taken by some people, Columbus among them, to be 25–33% smaller than the modern estimate of about 40,000 km for Earth’s circumference. For convenience, to have funding from inland Castilian monarchs with little experience with seafaring, Columbus took the ‘short yardstick’. Lucky he, and the Castilians, was that there was a continent on the way, just shy of 30% of the total landmass of the planet. Not a small serendipitous crash.

Interpretation of Toscanelli vision of the Atlantic, with approximate placement of the far east (Japan as Ciappangu) and the mythological Antilla island.

This naming confusion, together with other miscalculations like the size of the Eurasian continent, the distance to Japan from the mainland, and the existence of a mythological ‘Antilla’ island east of Japan, made Columbus pitch that he will reach some land about 4,400 km west of the Canary Islands.

He was off by almost 16,000 km if his aim was to reach the vicinity of Japan!

The Taxing Metric

With a continental miscalculation one can see how having universal measurement units helps — unless one has profound ignorance of the continents that exist on the planet to save the day, but condemn, decimate, mutilate and abuse millions of humans who will fall under the administration of that deceiving money-graving person (for more on Columbus’ administration in what was called the ‘Antilles’, modern-day Hispaniola and Cuba, read the reports from his contemporaries).

As transcendental — or not — history-changing Columbus’ blunder and continental serendipity is, this is not the reason for the metric system.

The infamous metric, sadly, comes mainly for taxes, French taxes to be exact.

The metric’s inception was an attempt of unification of measures within France. The kingdom was born out of annexing neighbouring administrations over the centuries, but keeping the local structures mostly intact. Therefore, by the late 18th century it had many different regional measurement systems. The monarchy under King Louis XVI, well on its way to absolutism and centralism, ordered the Academy of Sciences to come up with a unified system. That process was still going on when the Revolution unfolded.

Nowadays, France seems like quite a homogeneous part of the world. Obviously ALL French people wear black-and-white horizontal striped shirts, red-capped berets, are thin and tall, with slim black trousers, both sexes have a spiralling moustache that they continuously apply wax to, making it pointy, while holding a baguette under their arm. While walking, they drink coffee from a delicate porcelain coffee mug sustained only with two fingers.

Beyond exaggerated stereotypes, such clichés just show that such reality is impossible, even more in the case of France.

Even today France is one of the most diverse countries in Europe. Up to nine languages are natively spoken there, and its modern borders were not established until after WWII. Moreover, not even kisses are standardised! Depending on which part of the country you are in, you give two, three, or up to four cheek kisses to greet each other. Or you start from the left or right, and these do not even properly overlap (see map).


Adapted from Bill Rankin and Armand Colling (parlez-vous le français?, cheek main direction).

The apparent homogenisation of the metric system actually comes out of that diversity. Citing directly from Wikipedia here:
“on the eve of the Revolution in 1789, the eight hundred or so units of measure in use in France had up to a quarter of a million different definitions because the quantity associated with each unit could differ from town to town, and even from trade to trade […] These variations were promoted by local vested interests, but hindered trade and taxation [20][21].

Notice the taxes there. Paris’ post-1789 administration, but pre-republican, had an evident difficulty to grab taxes. The royal piecemeal system evolved over the centuries as a complex administrative, legislative, and executive mosaic landscape that emerged after the ending of the Western Roman Empire, with the monarch only having token powers in much of the lands it had nominal sovereignty over.

The Sun Kings grabbed more and more power over the 17th and 18th centuries, and, simultaneously, squeezed more the French finances. Finally, in a time pre-revolution when finances were in deep trouble — see the origins of the French Revolution — the need emerged to centralise local measures and make them uniform across the land. That kingdom-wide standardisation would nominally aid commerce and taxation.

This standardisation started with length. Scientists already wanted to standardise units — we love that; the fun is in figuring things out, not wasting time in conversions. An initial attempt was metro cattolico, from Greek metron (measure), which is the same root as the metric in music: the counting or rhythm of the melody. It also accounts for meteorology, which is the study of the weather, or accounting for weather conditions one particular place experiences — so much rain, so much cold/hot, so much wind, etc. Accountability can be moral or economic, but, it seems, can also be climatic And in some languages, like Spanish, the weather is called el tiempo, or the passing of time, linking change/weather with meteorology again: a tempo. And cattolico is the same sense as the Catholic Church, which simply means universal church, in opposition to others that were not as universal as them. This did not last long, though.

Anyway, the Royal (at that point) académie des sciences decided to base the whole standardisation of measures on the metre. It being a 10,000,000 division of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator following the line that passes through the Paris Observatory, not far from Notre-Dame cathedral. This distance is the Paris meridian arc, at 2°20′14.03″ East. Since this is only ¼ of the circumference of the Earth, the planet has a perimeter of roughly 40,000 km (easy to remember), depending on where you measure it, as it is not a perfectly spherical object but an oblate spheroid.

Moreover, conveniently, the current metre is about two cubits — which is based on human arm length from the tip of the fingers to the elbow — a step (the distance of a human — you know — step), and a yard (the tip of the fingers to the opposite soulder). These length units were widespread in pre-French-Revolutionary Europe, the Mediterranean, and Western Asia.

However, it would not be until 1799 when the current metre was established, and it involves Barcelona, and a lie. Choosing the meridian that crosses the Paris Observatory as the basis of 10,000 km is not only useful for nationalistic reasons. The meridian also allows a long section of land, from sea to sea, in a North–South line in Europe, where distances can be measured with precision, with latitude at each end point, by sea level. The seaside north of Paris is Dunkirk, and to the south the more famous Barcelona. The distance between the two is about 1,075 km, measured by November 1798. The survey manager to the south made an error, estimating the latitude of Barcelona wrong. He remeasured it, but kept it secret. This error would not be disclosed until 1836.

Then académie des sciences used the basis of the metre and water to set the other two standards: weight and volume. The unit of volume shall be that of a cube whose dimensions were a decimal fraction of the unit of length, a.k.a. cubic decimetre, or litre. Then, the weight of distilled water at 0º Celsius (the temperature of melting ice — do not get me started on temperature scales, now that I’m in the US) in that cube shall be, wait for it,

the grave.
(from Latin gravitas, i.e. weight)
This was accepted on 30 March 1791.

They did not like the grave, or the little grave, which they called gravet (one thousandth of a grave). It did not follow the neat deci, centi, mili categorisation — it should have been milligrave. Then, by 1795, already a republic, the national assembly changed the metric unit of weight to gram, from the Byzantine Empire: one twenty-fourth part of an ounce (two oboli) corresponding to about 1.14 modern grams. So kinda convenient, also a similar name to grain (like wheat grain), though 1 gram is about 20 grains.

Then our beloved litre, defined in 1795 as the volume of one cubic decimetre of water at the temperature of melting ice (0 °C). However, since the kilogram was redefined to be the mass of 1 cubic decimetre of water at its densest point at atmospheric pressure (about 4ºC), then the litre and kilogram no longer match. The story is more complex, but we will leave that for the fearful bureaus — coming soon. The word litre comes from the same root as livre (pound), a unit of weight and the name of the French currency until that moment. Again linguistics shows the equivalencies on peoples minds of volume and weight, which make no actual sense, but we are shaped that way.

For much talk of the litre, it is no longer a unit of the International System, but more on that later. It is still indeed part of the metric system, for the division in multiples of ten, and the kilo, deca, deci and other names for the multiples of 10.

In 1795 the republican France was eager to get more standardisation down their belts. Beyond the m, l, kg trio, they got to standardise the are (100 m2) for area, the franc for currency (from France) —s a side note, the currency was the third one to be on base 10, after the US currency and the Russian one — and the stère (1 m3) of firewood (from Greek, stereós, solid, that’s why people take steroids to have solid muscles, not sure if that’s true but I’ll not bother to check). Yeah, firewood needed standardisation. We are asking what does humanity want; apparently back in 1795 they wanted firewood to have a primary unit of standardisation. The world sure changes.

The académie des sciences and the national assembly tried to standardise time too. It would have been decimal: one republican second being 1/100,000 of a day, so bout 0.864 of a Babylonian one, which actually is closer to one human heart beat per republican second, as the heart usually beats a bit faster than once per babylonian second. But we have seen how that went down the drain because the British did better clocks, as we have seen. So much for French vs British clichés and stereotypes.

Beyond seconds’ failure, the metre and weight also failed at the end of the French Empire, the first one. Well, their definitions, to be exact. Because exactitude was the problem.

For the metre, the “Barcelona lie” had been intended to ensure international reproducibility. Who would have thought! This was impractical. So the world lost tourists from all nations coming to Barcelona to measure its latitude and distance to Dunkirk. The city has other issues with tourists, though. Beyond that, the “Barcelona lie” was a small error compared to the “gravitational lie”, i.e. the Earth’s surface has no exact gravity everywhere on its surface, making the planet not a spheroid but a geoid: a kind of potato, a really smooth potato. In actual terms that means that the meridian arc that crosses Paris’ Observatory is about 2 km longer than estimated, so 10.002 kilometres. Or the metre being 0.2 mm shorter than it should be.

In any case, the meridian measure was abandoned and a metal bar held in Paris was the actual definition. We now had a 19th-century French mostassaf. Not a great progress, but at least the units were easy to remember.

For the gram, the “be water, my friend” did not work either.

Humans tend to put our mind into precision once we get a target. The target was universalisation that could be measured. A mass standard made of water was inconvenient and unstable. It depended on the pressure, which was dependent on other measures. Moreover, even pure water is not “pure water” everywhere in the world. Making it “pure” might be difficult if one only wants H2O molecules in it. And beyond being H2O, the ratio of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes (different masses of an atom) is not constant: it might “weigh” differently even though it occupies the same volume.

Therefore, since you already went to the French mostassaf to ask for a copy of a metal bar for the metre, since you were at the door, why not ask for a copy of a kilogram too? Thus, they made a provisional mass standard of the grave, ehem, kilogram.

This was THE metric for much of the beginning of its history, that is, until the fearful bureaus arrived!

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