Origin and Commentary on the Metric System
A nice discussion on the origin of the metric system may be found at:
Origin of the Metric System
In the US we hear grumbling about it, but this is nothing new. I recently came across an article in Horological Science Newsletter, Issue 2006-2. It is partially reproduced below.
Grimthorpe's Grasshopper? (ed note – “grasshopper" is a type of clock escapement)
by Henry Casson
Once again on my travels I took a horological book. This time it was "Clocks Watches and Bells" by the man with three names, Edmund Beckett Denison, later Lord Grimthorpe. It is described as "a rudimentary treatise", which must be Victorian for “elementary" It is a tiny book, well suited for travel. It was first published in 1850 and the eighth edition broke into the twentieth century. It was reprinted in 1975. Every horological enthusiast should own a copy.
Grimthorpe is a curmudgeon's curmudgeon. He was a lawyer specializing in railway law. There was a speculative boom in railways at that time like the recent Internet frenzy. His law practice made him extremely rich, but he had time for clocks, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, theology and church politics. He was the ruling expert, at any rate in his own view, on bells, clocks, locks and window fastenings. He was a most prolific writer of letters to the editor of the London Times, most of them argumentative, and some thoroughly unpleasant. These included a vigorous swing at the medical profession (he was inclined to favor homeopathy.) He was described in his time as "Handsome, scowling (most of the time) carelessly dressed, and unshakably confident in his opinions." When made a peer he took the name of a town in north Yorkshire, Grimthorpe. The name means "unpleasant village".
My favorite quotation from his book, which serves to show the tone of his writing, is his swing at the metric system. Writing on the length of a second beating pendulum he continues
" The length of a seconds pendulum so nearly resemble the French Metre of 39.371 in., that some persons may fancy that that most ridiculous and mischievous revolutionary measure had an origin as rational as being the length of a seconds pendulum in some latitude. But it has not. It was intended to be the 40 millionth part of a meridian of the earth - about as rational a standard as if we enacted that the yard should be the 420 millionth of the mean distance of the moon, which it is very nearly; and astronomers know the moon's distance within a less fraction than the difference of the metre from what it pretends to be, but is not. Yet there are people who want to force on all the world this absurd, inconvenient and useless measure, invented by a nation whose language is declining all over the world; while the English language, with that standard of measures that every man carries in his arms, his legs and his head, is spreading over all the world so that it will soon be the only universal language, if it is not so already"
Commentary, especially from the French, is invited.
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