History
The metric system was first implemented during the French Revolution (1790s) with just the metre and kilogram as standards. In the 1860s British scientists, working through the British Association for the Advancement of Science laid the foundations for a coherent system based on length, mass and time, but the inclusion of electrical units into the system was hampered until 1900 when Giorgi identified the need to define an electrical quantity alongside the original three quantities. Meanwhile, in 1875, the Treaty of the Metre passed custodianship of the prototype kilogram and metre from French to international control. In 1921 the Treaty was extended to include all physics measurements and in 1948 an overhaul of the metric system was set in motion which resulted in the publication of the International System of Units in 1960.
Read more about this topic: International System Of Units
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)