This book succinctly traces the history of the metric system from early modern proposals of
decimal measures to the birth of the system in Revolutionary France through its formal
international adoption under the supervision of an international General Committee of Weights
and Measures (CGPM) to its later expansion into the International System of Units (SI)
currently formulated entirely in terms of physical constants. The wide range of human
activities that employ weights and measures from practical commerce to esoteric science
influenced both the development and the diffusion of the metric system. The roles of constants
of nature in the formulation of the 18th-century metric system and in the 21st-century
reformulation of the SI are described. Finally the status of the system in the United States
the last major holdout against its everyday use is also discussed.
