Richard Gawel, age 12, of Toronto 154, Ontario, Canada, for his question:
Where did the metric system originate?.
It is thought that our remote ancestors learned to count on their ten fingers. If this was so, it seems likely that they would have invented the metric system way back at the dawn of history. Maybe they did and this bit of information was lost. But so far as we know, the neat metric system was not invented until the late 1700s, And its place of origin was France.
When people wish to trade goods, obviously they must agree on some system to measure them. If you think about this, you realize that there must be a basic unit to measure length, another to measure weight and another to measure volume. It seems that each early civilization came to this same basic conclusion.
However, until fairly recent times, each country selected its own particular basic measuring units. Canada and the American Colonies inherited their basic units from the British imperial yard, gallon and pound. These were complicated by a hodgepodge of feet and inches, rods and poles, perches, fathoms and many other odd units. Meantime, French, Spanish, Portuguese and many other .countries introduced a multitude of still more measuring units.
As far as possible, the North Americans made their measurements correspond with the British imperial basics. Meantime, in a quiet way, several French thinkers came up with a sensible solution to the problem. In the year 1670, Gabriel Mouton, the vicar of Saint Paul's church at Lyons, suggested a more logical method of measuring. It was based entirely on the decimal system of tens. His basic unit was the meter. Its proposed length was based on a tiny fraction of arc of a great circle of the earth.
In those days, this geographical concept was a stroke of genius. A great circle, of course, has 360 degrees. Each degree has 60 minute degrees and each minute unit has 60 second units. Other French scholars helped to perfect the idea and in 1671, a geodetic survey was made to measure a precise arc between Dunkirk, France and a point near Barcelona in Spain. This elaborate groundwork gave the meter on which the original metric system was based. And the whole idea was French, all the way. Word additions were invented to partition and to extend it and these same additions were to name the metric units of weight and volume.
The tedious task progressed through the years. And in 1791, the original metric system was presented to the French National Assembly by the Paris Academy of Sciences.
Though the basic system was admired by many thinkers around the world, nobody was completely satisfied. Eventually this led to the establishment of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. For this purpose, the French donated a site at Serves, a suburb of Paris. Prom time to time, there have been revisions to make the basic units more precise and possible improvements will be made in the future. But the original French metric system, based on its neat tens, remains more or less the same.