Useful Golf Links

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE METRE

by Richard Wilson

Elmgreen Golf Club uses metres for length measurements so here Richard Wilson gives the background to how the Metric System came about.

France, at the end of the 1700s, was in serious disorder, heavily in debt and trying to deal with two bad harvests in 1787 and 1788. The citizens were hungry, angry and frustrated. Louis XVI was under pressure from the elected representatives to grant a Bill of Rights and he agreed. However, when the elected representatives journeyed up to his palace at Versailles on 20th June 1789, they found they were locked out. Louis XVI had decided that a hall the delegates were to use needed re-decoration. The delegates moved to a nearby indoor tennis court, had a meeting and swore themselves in as the elected government of France called the Assembly. The French Revolution was under way.

The Assembly had policies which involved rounding up and guillotining clerics, aristocrats and many citizens. It is estimated that 300,000 were rounded up, many simply murdered, about 17,000 made it to the guillotine.

Right in the middle of this period of massive turmoil the Assembly made a significant positive move. France had thousands of measuring systems; every village had its own. The Assembly wanted this profusion of systems to be replaced by one to promote trade. They gave this task to a group of internationally renowned scientists in the French Academy of Sciences. Sadly, before they could get started, Antoine Lavoisier was guillotined along with twenty-seven other tax collectors on May 8^th 1794.

Selecting a "Yardstick"

The scientists faced a massive task. The definition of measuring is "the ascertainment of extent by comparison with a standard." Finding a widely acceptable standard was a longtime problem. In a move of excellence, a length on the earth was chosen as the standard.

There was an old survey line from Dunkirk to Barcelona. They smoothed out all the ups and downs and calculated the length of a line of longitude from Dunkirk to Barcelona. They then extended it from the equator to the North Pole. The length of this line of longitude was the definitive new standard for length. Of course it was far too long so they took 1/10 millionth of it as a working standard and that length was defined as the metre, which they cast in copper. In 1793 the Assembly gave legal status to the metre.

One of the scientists, Joseph Louis Lagrange, made many significant contributions to mathematics but his next possibly outshines them all - he made the metre decimal. He had the vision to see that the decimal system was the only one to allow expansion to kilometres for the highways down to nanometres for computer chips.

The next development was also brilliant. The scientist ignored a multitude of volume standards in use in France and made 1/10 of the metre into a cube, a decimetre cubed (dm³) and it was the new volume reference standard and a bottle with a slender neck and a calibration mark was the working standard.

The scientists were uncertain what to call this new volume standard and a friend said ‘call it after me’. His name was Claude Emile Jean-Baptiste Litre, a wine merchant, and the name stuck. The scientist then filled the litre with water near 0^o C where water has its maximum density and the extra weight was the kilogramme. The system was complete.

The metre and kilogramme were eventually recast in a platinum alloy. It was one of the success stories for the French Revolution and it was a great public event when in June 1799 the platinum metre was paraded about and finally handed over to the Archives for safe keeping. A law made it the authorised system for France.

Global Spread

The metric system spread rapidly and in 1875 the French Government gave the centre charged with minding the metre over to the world and it is now international territory. In 1960 the General Conference for Weights and Measures promoted the metre to be a world standard for length.

Scientists from the French Academy of Sciences put the metric system together in the middle of the French revolution. It is now used by 6 billion people and would be a strong contender for greatest human achievement in applied science.

Modern golf has quality equipment, quality environment and the metre matches this perfectly and that is what is available at Elmgreen.