Amid the ideological and religious upheavals of the last 200 years, the metric system has spread around the world as an exemplar of science and rationality. But in both its champions and detractors, it has evoked as much passion as reason. Created beginning in 1790 by the French Academy of Sciences at the behest of the revolutionary National Assembly, the metric system reflected a century of measurement reform proposals. The meter was defined by a law of the National Convention in 1793 as one ten-millionth of a quarter-meridian, the distance from the earth's equator to one of its poles. Ken Alder of Northwestern University, studying records in Paris, found that the attempt to measure the meridian mixed painstaking detail with high adventure.
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