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Knight's Mechanical Encyclopedia (ed. Knight), M. (search)
in of the system is due to the government of Louis XV., who named a commission to investigate the best means of reforming the great diversity of weight and measures then used in the different cities and provinces of France. These investigations were continued under his successor, and in 1790 Talleyrand distributed among the members of the National Assembly a proposal for the establishment of a single and universal standard of measurement. A committee from the Academy of Sciences, Borda, Lagrange, Laplace, and Condorcet, all men of the highest scientific eminence, were appointed under a decree of the Assembly to report upon the selection of a natural standard. They proposed, in their report, that one ten-millionth part of a quarter circumference of the globe at the meridian of Paris should be taken as the unit of lineal measure. This is undoubtedly a more definite standard than that of the English and American systems, which are based upon the length of a pendulum beating second