History
The BIPM was created on 20 May 1875, following the signing of the Metre Convention, a treaty among 51 nations (as of August 2008). It is based at the Pavillon de Breteuil in Sèvres, France, a 4.35 ha site (originally 2.52 ha) granted to the Bureau by the French Government in 1876, where it enjoys extraterritorial status, a status that was clarified by the French decree No 70-820 of 9 September 1970.
Read more about this topic: International Bureau Of Weights And Measures
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)