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Explore

  • Metric System Demonstration Apparatus
  • The Origin of the Metric System
  • Early American Legal Standards
  • Metric Units Made Legal
  • Diffusing and Opposing the Metric System
  • Reforms 1971-1990
  • Recent Objects
  • Resources

Metric System Apparatus

Resources

American History Museum

Arthur H. Frazier, United States Standards of Weights and Measures: Their Creation and Creators, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978.

John L. Heilbron, "The Measure of Enlightenment," in T. Fraengsmyr, J. L. Heilborn and R. E. Rider, eds., The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Charles C. Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 223-285, 458-494.

P.A. Kidwell, "The Metric System Enters the American Classroom, 1790-1890," in From Calculus to Computers: Using the Last 200 Years of Mathematics History in the Classroom, Amy Shell-Gellasch and Dick Jardine, eds., Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 2005, pp. 229-236.

Witold Kula, Measures and Men, trans. R. Szreter, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

James F. Schooley, Responding to National Needs: The National Bureau of Standards Becomes the National Institute of Standards and Technology 1969-1993, Washington: National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2000, esp. pp. 206-220

C. F. Treat, A History of the Metric Controversy in the United States, Washington, D.C.: National Bureau of Standards, 1971.

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