| ▲ | hnuser123456 21 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||
It started with the grandfather clock. Everyone's clock pendulum needed to be the same length to have the same length of a second. So a meter also happens to (approximately, this was before we could easily be precise to several decimal places) be the length of pendulum that cycles at 0.5 hz (each swing back and fourth is a second) in 9.8 m/s^2 gravity. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | geuis 21 hours ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
It started with the French. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metric_system The meter was originally based on the measured dimensions of the Earth. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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