Ed Helms

A foot in Williamsburg might not match a foot in Philadelphia.

And New York is like doing its own thing there.

They have the Dutch system.

It's just like a total mess.

In 1790,

Across the Atlantic and in the middle of their own revolution, France's National Assembly turned to their Academy of Sciences and basically said, please invent a measurement system that can survive chaos.

Which means try to deduce an invariable standard for all measurements and weights, et cetera.

This is like how –

the enlightenment worked, right?

This is sort of peak enlightenment thinking.

The idea was that nature is impartial.

Kings get beheaded, governments collapse, but the planet is constant.

It keeps spinning.

So if you base your measurements on nature itself, they will outlast wars and revolutions and very bad political decisions.

And that's how we arrived at

The meter, which was named after the Greek word metron, meaning measure, standard, or rule.

This was, again, France's National Assembly.

They defined the meter as 1 10 millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator.

Then built everything else from there, weight, volume, surface area, and the whole thing scaled up or down using a very simple decimal system, all based on the number 10.

And this was really badass.