How were the units of measurement for distance created? More specifically, how were they decided to be a specific length?

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How were the units of measurement for distance created? More specifically, how were they decided to be a specific length?

In: Mathematics

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Originally they were just “hands” or “feet” – loose measurements based on the proportions of the craftsman. This log is 18 feet. The horse is 16 hands tall.

That’s fine for small projects like a canoe or a cabin, but once humans started building major settlements and putting together large monuments you need a way to standardize units between teams of workers.

So the lead architect will define the *exact* length of a hand or foot (or cubit, or whatever) and the crews will all use that so that each team’s parts are measured the same.

Once you have craftsmen in different locations all using the same standard length to cut their components you’ve effectively created a national standard.

Over time, governments and craftsman guilds codify these to make sure that everything they order is made correctly forever. Then you have a permanent standard.

Every society created their own specific standards, usually based on some body part (short units) or nearby geographical feature (mapping scale units)

Anonymous 0 Comments

Long before the metric system, measurement systems were based on some known distance.

Some community said “hey, from this rock to that big tree, we’re gonna call that a Spoigle”. Then everyone knew how far a Spoigle was, and could use that to estimate longer or shorter distances “Ukthar lives about 20 Spoigles away from me” or “man, that tree hahs to be like half a Spoigle tall”.

Similarly, smaller units of measurement were generally agreed upon in the same manner, often based on some important thing. Maybe the King’s Staff, passed down from king to king was a known length, and they’d say “this room is 3 staves wide”.

As such in ancient historical times many different civilizations had their own unique set of measurement systems, and through trade and sharing of information over time, some of them became more widely used, spread, and more popular.

EVENTUALLY as society progressed, we developed a more consistent measurement system, commonly known as the metric system.

The problem with those OTHER systems of measurement was usually in conversion. Even the Imperial system has this issue. 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1800 yards in a mile? Really arbitrary numbers, hard to dice up into bite sized chunks and translate to other systems.

With the Metric system, they defined distance with a known, measureable, and constant base. The meter, for example, is defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole.

This is true forever (relatively), and not something that changes. (Like a foot is the length of the King’s Foot. New king, new foot, bad unit.)

Then larger and smaller units of measurement were just multiplied or divided by 10, since that makes the conversions and math easier.

A Kilometer is just 1000 meters. A centimeter is 1/100 of a meter, etc.

The concrete definitions, and ease of conversion and use, led to the widespread adoption of the metric system (with only a couple holdout nations who still use the imperial system heavily). Someday maybe we’ll ALL use the same system, but only time will tell.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They were decided to be a specific length. The original decisions were indeed just arbitrarily made. But how long exactly “a metre” or “a foot” was, didn’t matter in the slightest. All that was needed is that when someone said “2 metres tall”, everyone else had the same idea of length.