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The General Conference on Weights and Measures (French: Conférence générale des poids et mesures – CGPM), which was established by the Metre Convention of 1875, brought together many international organisations to establish the definitions and standards of a new system and to standardise the rules for writing and presenting measurements.
Metric units are units based on the metre, gram or second and decimal (power of ten) multiples or sub-multiples of these. According to Schadow and McDonald, [1] metric units, in general, are those units "defined 'in the spirit' of the metric system, that emerged in late 18th century France and was rapidly adopted by scientists and engineers.
The basic unit of length in the imperial and U.S. customary systems is the yard, defined as exactly 0.9144 m by international treaty in 1959. [2] [5] Common imperial units and U.S. customary units of length include: [6] thou or mil (1 ⁄ 1000 of an inch) inch (25.4 mm) foot (12 inches, 0.3048 m) yard (3 feet, 0.9144 m)
The SI system has been adopted as the official system of weights and measures by most countries in the world. A notable outlier is the United States (US). Although used in some contexts, the US has resisted full adoption; continuing to use "a conglomeration of basically incoherent measurement systems". [2]
The avoirdupois units of mass and weight differ for units larger than a pound (lb). The British imperial system uses a stone of 14 lb, a long hundredweight of 112 lb and a long ton of 2,240 lb. The stone is not a measurement of weight used in the US.
length "The metre, symbol m, is the SI unit of length. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the speed of light in vacuum c to be 299 792 458 when expressed in the unit m s −1, where the second is defined in terms of ∆ν Cs." [1]
The SI prefixes are metric prefixes that were standardised for use in the International System of Units (SI) by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in resolutions dating from 1960 to 2022. [1] [2] Since 2009, they have formed part of the ISO/IEC 80000 standard. They are also used in the Unified Code for Units of Measure (UCUM).
The former Weights and Measures office in Seven Sisters, London Units of measurement, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua. A unit of measurement, or unit of measure, is a definite magnitude of a quantity, defined and adopted by convention or by law, that is used as a standard for measurement of the same kind of quantity. [1]