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:
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“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)