Many years ago our family moved from a remote rural area to the city, and I immediately began high school. Of all the new things encountered there my favorite was the study of physics. In those far off days when rote learning was still popular the first thing recited was the definition of a meter - “a meter is the distance between two fine lines on a platinum-iridium bar kept at Paris”.
We won't go into how some clever person arrived at that distance, but the meter became the fundamental unit of length measurement and all concepts derived from length, such as area and volume.
The next concept met was that of mass. This was related to length by saying the mass of one cubic centimeter of water was one gram.
Multiples (and divisions) of the meter and gram have been bundled by some factor of 10. Well known Latin prefixes have been used to name these bundles. Anyone involved with computers, as you must be to be reading this, is very familiar with kilo, mega, and giga as in kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes.
The fractional prefixes centi, milli, and micro are used throughout the metric system of measurement. Even tradesmen who don't measure timber thicknesses in millimeters but cling to such oddities as eights or sixteenths, will measure electric current in milliamps.
So the metric system all depends on that platinum bar in Paris, and the fact we each have ten fingers (thumbs included); or is it ten toes!
