Ed #12 Standards

Other common measurements grew out of human activities. An acre, or 43,560 square feet, was originally the amount of land that could be plowed by a team of oxen in a single day. (Actually, in half a day, since the oxen needed to be fed and rested in the afternoon.) The mile was the distance traveled by a Roman legion in 1,000 paces. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks used a wheat seed as the smallest unit of weight, while Arabs measured the weight of small objects with carob seeds, which gave jewelers the term “carat.”

While the first decimal measurement systems were used as early as the Bronze Age, they only began to achieve widespread use in the late 1700s in France. In 1793, the national government under Napoleon adopted the metric system, with a meter established as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator when measured on a straight line along the surface of the earth through Paris. All units were in multiples of 10, and area, volume, liquid capacity and weight measures were inter-related.

Wars, national pride, tradition and the desire for more exacting standards all helped to slow the adoption of a truly global metric system. (For the sake of absolute consistency, the meter is now defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second.) In North America, where people combined the measuring systems brought from their homelands, standards for such measurements as gallons and tons came to differ from the “Imperial” measures used in Great Britain.