Doing things by tens
About two hundred years ago, there was a big change in the country of
France. The French people were being badly mistreated by their king and
the nobles. So, the people rose up and got rid of them all. The French
then made a new start, with a new government, new laws, and many other
changes.
One of the changes was in the system of weights and measures.
Measurements in France at that time were in a dreadful mess. For one
thing, a foot in the north was not the same length as a foot in the
south I
A group of scientists was asked to work out a new system of measurement.
Not only was the new system to be better than what the French people
were using, it was to be better than any other system then in use
anywhere.
In some systems of measurement, the length of a human foot, or a number
of grains of barley placed side by side, were used as units of length.
But for the new system, the scientists did something more exact. They
divided the distance from the North Pole to the equator into ten million
parts. One part was made the unit of length and called a meter (MEE
tuhr).
