Remembering What The Metric System Missed

The French revolutionaries came up with many ideas regarding starting society over. They were obsessed with the number ten. They planned a year with ten months and a week with ten days. Clocks that they made are in museums, the clocks have ten hours.

None of those things lasted but one idea of theirs is still with us, and has caught on across the world. It is their measurement system, the Metric System.

As we might expect the Metric System is based on the number ten, and also water. The main unit of length is the meter, and it is an entirely arbitrary length. The meter can be multiplied or divided by multiples of ten so that a hundredth of a meter is a centimeter and a thousand meters is a kilometer. Some of the metric prefixes are not used much, a decimeter is one-tenth of a meter and a decameter is ten meters.

A cubic decimeter is the volume defined as a liter. A liter of water has a mass of one kilogram. A cubic centimeter of water has a mass of one gram. A cubic meter of water has a mass of one metric ton. The standard sizes of rectangular paper are arranged so that the long side of the paper is the short side of the next highest size.

The Metric System was a brilliant idea but there was one thing that it really missed. That is the acceleration due to gravity of a falling object. The acceleration due to gravity of a falling object is 32 feet, or 9.8 meters, per second squared. What this means is that if the meter had been just a little bit shorter, actually 98 cm, the acceleration due to gravity would fit neatly into the measurement system.

This is really ironic considering that the Eiffel Tower would be built as the entrance arch, the tallest structure ever built, for the great exhibition in 1889 that celebrated the centennial of the French Revolution. Not only that but the first flights, in balloons, were made in France before the Revolution. The meter is an entirely arbitrary length and the Revolutionaries could have selected the length to incorporate the acceleration due to gravity, as long as we measure time in seconds.

One thing that I think gets overlooked is the early development of automobiles in France. Have you ever noticed how so many automotive words are French words? Chassis, sedan, coupe, chauffeur, garage, gasoline, carburetor.

Remember the unit of measurement that I introduced here. I call it the "Grav", for gravity. A grav is to measure vertical distances. A grav is equal to 16 feet, or 4.9 meters, as long as we measure time in seconds. A grav fits with the acceleration due to gravity.

If you time an object falling from a height, and want to know how high it fell from, just square the time in seconds and it will give you the height in gravs. If you want to know how long it will take an object to fall to the ground from a height, the square root of the height in gravs will give the time in seconds.

This is what the Metric System would have accomplished if the meter had been equal to 98 cm. Of course this neglects air resistance and so only applies to weighty, compact objects.