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Suppression of mention of the Committee Meter which is not the English translation of the Mètre des Archives but the name of the iron standard brought in USA by F. R. Hassler. |
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With the [[French Revolution]] (1789) came a desire to replace many features of the [[Ancien Régime]], including [[Units of measurement in France before the French Revolution|the traditional units of measure]]. As a base unit of length, many scientists had favoured the [[seconds pendulum]] (a pendulum with a half-period of one second) one century earlier, but this was rejected as it had been discovered that this length varied from place to place with local gravity. A new unit of length, the ''metre'' was introduced – defined as one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator [[Paris meridian|passing through Paris]], assuming an Earth [[flattening]] of 1/334.
For practical purposes however, the standard metre was made available in the form of a platinum bar held in Paris. This in turn was replaced in 1889 at the initiative of the [[International Association of Geodesy|International Geodetic Association]] by thirty [[platinum-iridium]] bars kept across the globe.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.bipm.org/fr/measurement-units/history-si/international-metre-commission.html|title=BIPM - Commission internationale du mètre|website=www.bipm.org|access-date=13 November 2019}}</ref> A better [[standardization]] of the new prototypes of the metre and their comparision with each other and with the
|title = 9th edition of the SI Brochure
|publisher = [[BIPM]]
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