Sir, – An excellent letter (Colm Ó hAnluain, September 28th) expresses very well the confusion with measuring units in this country. It is possible that this confusion stems from a lack of appreciation that the metric system would be a strong contender for the greatest applied science achievement of all time.
On May 8th, 1790, during the French Revolution, a group of elite scientists, trapped in the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, was given the task of replacing the thousands of village scale measuring systems in France at that time, with one. It was a massive task but they succeeded.
The scientists extended an old survey line from Dunkirk to Barcelona to give the length of a quadrant of the earth and then took 1/10,000,000th of this length as the metre; they built on this and developed the litre from the metre (dm3). They then filled the litre with water and the extra weight was the kilogramme. The whole system was made decimal so that it could deal with all sizes. It was rapidly accepted worldwide and is now used by 6,000 million people.
If our citizens fully understood the quality and magnificence of the system it would, I believe, be difficult to settle for anything less. – Yours, etc,