It would hardly have been adopted everywhere if the French had simply 'made it up.' In that sense the expedition proved to be essential to the 'selling' of the metric system, as well as for all the scientific discoveries it unexpectedly produced. |
That fiction, however, would have enormous consequences, |
This meant that not only were some measures based on the human body ... but that many other measures were based on human labor or on some human evaluation of their worth, ... Land was measured in days (how many days of labor did it take to reap the harvest?) or in bushels (how many bushels of grain did it take to sow the land?). |