The International Prototype Meter is an irido-platinum bar, 102 centimeters in length. Three lines are engraved near each end of the bar; they are from six to eight microns wide, and about one-half millimeter apart, and the meter is defined as the distance between the middle line of eachgroup, when the temperature of the bar is at 0° C. The lines used to define the meter and its subdivisions were traced at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris.
While the preliminary work for the produc tion of the new standards was in progress, in March 1875, another international conference was called by the French government, in which France, the United States and 15 other nations out of the 19 represented signed a convention on 20 May 1875, providing for the establishment and support of a permanent International Bureau of Weights and Measures, the manage ment and control. of which should be in the hands of an international committee having 14 members, each from a different country. As a site for this bureau, the French govern ment assigned a piece of ground at Sevres, in the Park of Saint Cloud, declaring it to be neutral territory. It was agreed that the ex penses of the bureau were to be borne by con tributions paid by the contracting governments, the amount being proportionate both to the population of the country and the extent to which the metric system was used there.
The routine work of the bureau is performed under the supervision of a body termed the International Committee of Weights and Measures. This is in turn subject to the control of a general conference to which all the con tracting governments send delegates, and which is to meet at least once every six years. This conference is charged will all questions regard ing the measures to be taken to spread the use of the metric system in the countries which have not yet adopted it, and it is also called upon to pass definitely upon any new funda mental determinations that may be proposed.
The Advantages of the Metric System and its Proposed Adoption by the United States and Great Britain.— The initial diffi culty and expense incident to a substitution of the metric system for that now in use in the United States and Great Britain have been much exaggerated by many writers on the sub ject. There would be no necessity for abso lutely replacing the machinery appliances now in use; all that would be needed in the great majority of cases would be to re-mark them in accordance with the metric scale, and to ad just their operations in accord with metric re quirements. It has indeed been truly said that the only machines that would altogether lose their usefulness would be those for making the old measures. It need never be necessary to change the present lathes, drills, shapers, etc., since there would be no necessity for the manu factured objects to have a particular metric size; all that would be needed would be to have them marked and listed in the metric designa tions of their actual size. It should be borne in mind, in this connection, that at present the sizes of parts are seldom exact unit sizes, since they are not made to conform to an arithmeti cal rule but to the exigencies of their practical mechanical use.
The metric system finds an earnest advocate in Hon. William C. Redfield, Secretary of the Department of Commerce. In an address at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Chambers of Commerce of the United States, in Washington, on 2 Feb. 1917, he said of our present system of weights and measures that it stands as a bar across that path to foreign trade which it is necessary that we should tread.° In another
address, made before the Philadelphia Clam ber of Commerce, 10 Jan. 1917, he noted that it required four pages of an official publication to describe the various kinds of bushels that exist in America, and that the Philadelphia mint buys all its supplies and common metals by one kind of weights and measures, its precious metals by another and does all its laboratory work by a third, this latter being, of course, the metric system. As at least a step in the right direc tion, he cites the frequent use in drawings of a decimal division of feet and inches.
As to the best means of generalizing the use of the metric system in the United States, Dr. Samuel W. Stratton, director of the Bureau of Standards, writes: °Commerce, technology, and science have, on account of their interna tional character, availed themselves of the ad vantages of the metric system more than manu facturing, which is local, and, unlike exporting, not in direct touch with world markets. Hence science and commerce with their world-wide outlook should be the advisers of industry, and their conclusion is that the first principle is to supply what the customer needs, and that inter national business requires international weights and measures.° As to one of the great merits of the system, we haw the following emphatic opinion from the late Lord Kelvin (William Thompson, 1824-1907) : °I believe I am not overstating the truth when I say that half the time occupied by clerks and draughtsmen in engineers' and surveyors' offices — I am sure at least one-half of it — is work entailed upon them by the in convenience of the present farrago of weights and measures. The introduction of the French Metrical System will produce an enormous sav ing in business offices of all kinds — engineer ing, commercial, and retail shops.° The Rt. Hon. Arthur J. Balfour, replying in 1895 to a deputation advocating the intro duction of the system in England, used the fol lowing words: °Upon the merits of the case I think there can be no doubt whatever that the judgment of the whole civilized world, not excluding countries which still adhere to the antiquated systems under which we suffer, has long decided that the metric system is the only rational system.* As a step in the direction of the metric sys tem, the decimalization of the coinage has found some favor in England recently, the present florin (a two-shilling piece) being pro posed as a new monetary unit since it is ex actly one-tenth of a pound sterling. As the British farthing is one ninety-sixth of a florin an exceedingly trifling reduction of its value would make of it a °cent* repre senting the one-hundredth part of the florin, and worth only a very small fraction less than one-half of the United States or Canadian cent. Another idea has been to add ten-pence to the value of the pound, which would then contain 250 pence or 1,000 farthings of tin changed value. A new florin, as the tenth of this new pound, would then be worth 100 farthings. It is interesting to note that the proposition to decimalize the British coinage by making the florin, the tenth part of a pound sterling or sovereign, a money of account. and sub-dividing it into hundredths, has for several years been essentially introduced in Peru, where the gold libra, coined as an exact equivalent of the British pound sterling, is divided into 10 silver soles, the sol thus being worth exactly $0.48665, or the same as the British florin. The sol is in turn divided into 100 centavos worth 0.48665 cent of our money.