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weights and measures - events| c. 3000 BC | Egypt | The cubit, the length of the arm from the elbow to the extended finger tips, is devised in Egypt as the standard unit of linear measure. A royal cubit of black granite serves as the standard for all other cubit sticks. | | c. 600 BC | Rome | Roman king Tarquinius Priscus introduces the Roman Republican calendar. It consists of 12 months with a total of 355 days. An intercalated month is added between February 23 and 24 every two years in order to keep step with the seasons. Intercalations, however, are made irregularly and it becomes hopelessly confused. The calendar forms the basis of the Gregorian calendar. | | 46 BC | Rome | The Roman consul and dictator Julius Caesar instructs Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes to bring the Roman Republican calendar into line with the solar year. He creates the Julian calendar in which the year is 365 ¼ days long and begins 1 January. An extra day is inserted between 23 and 24 February every four years. The year 46 BC is 445 days long to bring it into line with the solar year. | | 1700 | Germany, Holy Roman Empire | The new Gregorian calendar is introduced in Germany and other Protestant European states, replacing the older, less accurate, Julian calendar. | | 1767 | America | English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon complete their demarcation of the Pennsylvania–Maryland border. Hereafter known as the Mason–Dixon line, the border will distinguish slave states from free. | | 1 August 1793 | France | The first metric weight system is introduced, in France. | | 20 May 1875 | France | The International Bureau of Weights and Measures is established in France by a treaty signed in Paris. Located at Sèvres, its purpose is to unify systems of measurement, and to establish standards by providing a prototype metre and kilogram as the basis for all scientific and other measures. | | 1 January 1876 | France | The International System of Weights and Measures comes into effect in France. | | October 1960 | world | The 11th general Conference on Weights and Measures replaces the metric system with the International System (SI) of weights and measures. It redefines the seven basic units of measurement, from which all others are derived, in atomic terms. The metre, for instance is redefined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line in the krypton-86 spectrum. | | 11 December 1975 | USA | The US Congress passes legislation calling for the voluntary conversion to the metric system in ten years. |
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| Time hustled him into a little noisy and rather dirty machinery, in a by-comer, and made him Member of Parliament for Coketown: one of the respected members for ounce weights and measures, one of the representatives of the multiplication table, one of the deaf honourable gentlemen, dumb honourable gentlemen, blind honourable gentlemen, lame honourable gentlemen, dead honourable gentlemen, to every other consideration. What evenings, when the candles came, and I was expected to employ myself, but, not daring to read an entertaining book, pored over some hard-headed, harder-hearted treatise on arithmetic; when the tables of weights and measures set themselves to tunes, as 'Rule Britannia', or 'Away with Melancholy'; when they wouldn't stand still to be learnt, but would go threading my grandmother's needle through my unfortunate head, in at one ear and out at the other He told us, however, that as he had always been a mere child in point of weights and measures and had never known anything about them |
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