Science Fact Finder | Time, Weights, and Measures - How Was The Length Of A Meter Originally Determined?

How was the length of a meter originally determined?

The French scientists who created the metric system had originally intended for the meter to represent one ten-millionth of the distance of a meridian (a meridian is an imaginary circle that runs in a north-south direction around the Earth, connecting the North Pole and the South Pole). They measured a meridian from the North Pole to the equator, passing through Dunkirk, France, and Barcelona, Spain. The task took nearly six years and was completed in November 1798.

The scientists casted a platinum-iridium bar, the length of a meter, to be the official physical replica of this unit of measurement. It was later discovered that the surveyors of the meridian made an error of about two miles. Rather than changing the length of the meter to conform to the actual distance, in 1889 the platinum-indium bar was chosen to represent, internationally, the...

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