Metre

The metre (Commonwealth spelling and BIPM spelling) or meter (American spelling) (from the French unit mètre, from the Greek noun μέτρον, 'measure') is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). The SI unit symbol is m. The metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second. The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole – as a result, the Earth's circumference is approximately 40,000 km today. In 1799, it was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar (the actual bar used was changed in 1889). In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. In 1983, the current definition was adopted. The imperial inch is defined as 0.0254 metres (2.54 centimetres or 25.4 millimetres). One metre is about ​3 3⁄8 inches longer than a yard, i.e. about ​39 3⁄8 inches. Metre is the standard spelling of the metric unit for length in nearly all English-speaking nations except the United States and the Philippines, which use meter. Other Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages likewise spell the word meter. Measuring devices (such as ammeter, speedometer) are spelled '-meter' in all variants of English. The suffix '-meter' has the same Greek origin as the unit of length. The etymological roots of metre can be traced to the Greek verb μετρέω (metreo) (to measure, count or compare) and noun μέτρον (metron) (a measure), which were used for physical measurement, for poetic metre and by extension for moderation or avoiding extremism (as in 'be measured in your response'). This range of uses is also found in Latin (metior, mensura), French (mètre, mesure), English and other languages. The motto ΜΕΤΡΩ ΧΡΩ (metro chro) in the seal of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), which was a saying of the Greek statesman and philosopher Pittacus of Mytilene and may be translated as 'Use measure!', thus calls for both measurement and moderation. The use of the word metre (for the French unit mètre) in English began at least as early as 1797. In 1671 Jean Picard measured the length of a 'seconds pendulum' (a pendulum with a period of two seconds) at the Paris observatory. He found the value of 440.5 lines of the Toise of Châtelet which had been recently renewed. He proposed a universal toise (French: Toise universelle) which was twice the length of the seconds pendulum. However, it was soon discovered that the length of a seconds pendulum varies from place to place: French astronomer Jean Richer had measured the 0.3% difference in length between Cayenne (in French Guiana) and Paris. Jean Richer and Giovanni Domenico Cassini measured the parallax of Mars between Paris and Cayenne in French Guiana when Mars was at its closest to Earth in 1672. They arrived at a figure for the solar parallax of 91/2 inches, equivalent to an Earth–Sun distance of about 22000 Earth radii. They were also the first astronomers to have access to an accurate and reliable value for the radius of Earth, which had been measured by their colleague Jean Picard in 1669 as 3269 thousand toises. Picard's geodetic observations had been confined to the determination of the magnitude of the Earth considered as a sphere, but the discovery made by Jean Richer turned the attention of mathematicians to its deviation from a spherical form. In addition to its significance for cartography, the determination of the Figure of the Earth became a problem of the highest importance in astronomy, inasmuch as the diameter of the Earth was the unit to which all celestial distances had to be referred.