Initially the
systems of measurement that people used were based on familiar things
such as foot, yard (nose tip to fingertip), hand, cubit (elbow to
tip of longest finger), or barleycorn. The first people to standardize
measurements were the Egyptians; the royal cubit dates to about 3000
B.C.E.
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Gabriel Mouton
was the first westerner to propose a decimal system of measurement
which would take one minute of the earth’s circumference
as a unit of length which could be repeatedly further divided by
tenths.
Here are the clues to find
out what year Mouton proposed this system:
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• the
number formed by the thousands and hundreds digits is the fourth
power of the smallest prime number
• the tens digit is the fourth prime number
• the sum of the digits is 14
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On June 19, King
Louis XVI of France met with a committee of twelve mathematicians
and scientists and approved the development of the metric system.
The next day the king was imprisoned when trying to flee the country.
A year later, from prison, the king issued an order for the engineers
Jean Delambre and Pierre Méchain to make the necessary measurements
to determine the official length of a meter (one ten-millionth part
of a meridional quadrant of the earth). Here are the clues to find
out what year King Louis XVI met with the mathematicians:
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• if the
tens digit were two less, then the number would be a palindrome
• the hundreds digit is one less than the only one-digit even cube
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When the metric
system was officially adopted by the Republic of France, the system’s
motto was “For all people, for all time.” Thirty-eight
years later, it was made the only system of measurement in France.
Here are the clues to find out when the metric system was adopted
initially by France:
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• the tens,
units and thousands digits are odd square numbers
• the hundreds digit is one less than the smallest prime number cubed
• the sum of the digits is 26
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When the United
States was a new country, they needed to agree upon their systems
of money and measurement. Thomas Jefferson was one of the people
advocating a decimal system, however, our congress chose to go with
the English system.
When Greenleaf’s New Practical Arithmetic was published, David Scott, the
principal of one of New York City’s public schools predicted: “The
introduction of the Metric System has my warm approval; I envy the school-master
of thirty years hence, who by it will be relieved of that stupefying incubus” (he
was referring to the English system of measurement). This was the same year that
the Congress of the United States approved the use of the metric system. Here
are the clues to find out when the congress approved but did not mandate the
use of the metric system: |
• the tens
and units digits are each the product of the two smallest primes
• the sum of the digits is 21
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| The Metric Conversion
Act was passed requiring all federal agencies in the United States
to have converted to the metric system of measurement. Here are the
clues
to find what year the USA decided to convert to metric: |
• the hundreds,
tens and units digits are consecutive odd numbers in descending
order
• the year is a multiple of five
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| President Jimmy
Carter appointed the first nominees to the U. S. Metric Board two
years after the law was passed; but the board was eliminated five
years later by budget cuts. A year before the deadline mandated by
the Metric Conversion Act passed, President George Bush signed an
executive order requiring all agencies to submit detailed metric
conversion plans to the Commerce Department. On September 30, the
deadline passed for all federal agencies in the U.S. to convert to
the metric system. Here are the clues to find out which year the
U.S. was to have
converted to the metric system: |
• if the
units digit were one less, the number would be a palindrome
• the sum of the digits is 21
|
| Unfortunately,
the deadline passed without the U.S. government agencies converting
completely to the metric system. On October 1, the New York Times
carried the
front page story entitled: “Missing What Didn’t Add Up, NASA Subtracted
an Orbiter.” On September 23, the Mars Climate Orbiter unexpectedly disappeared.
It was off course by about 60 miles at the end of its 416,000,000 mile journey
to Mars because of confusion over units of measure. The engineers at Lockheed
Martin Corporation who built the orbiter used the English unit of pounds when
making calculations of thrust, while NASA scientists assumed that the information
was calculated in newtons, a metric measurement. The misinformation was used
in the computers used to calculate the position and direction of the spacecraft.
Here is the clue to find out the year NASA made a $125,000,000 mistake because
not everyone was using the same system of measurement: |
• the sum
of the digits is 28.
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