The metric system was first described in 1668, and officially adopted by France in 1799. Over the course of the 1800s and 1900s, it became the dominant system worldwide, with the largest exception bei ...
The division of the circle into 360 degrees and the day into hours, minutes, and seconds can be traced to the Babylonians who had sexagesimal system of numbers. The 360 degrees may have been related t ...
The grain was the earliest unit of mass and is the smallest unit in the apothecary, avoirdupois, Tower, and troy systems. The early unit was a grain of wheat or barleycorn used to weigh the precious m ...
The use in typography of the point, which was one twelfth of a ligne in the customary French measures of the Ancien Régime, as a unit for measuring print type predates the metric system. Various typo ...
The Egyptian cubit, the Indus Valley units of length referred to above and the Mesopotamian cubit were used in the 3rd millennium BC and are the earliest known units used by ancient peoples to measure ...
The inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilization (3000–1500 BC. Mature period 2600–1900 BC) developed a sophisticated procedure of standardization, using weights and measures, evident by the excavat ...
Weights and measures have taken a great variety of forms over the course of history, from simple informal expectations in barter transactions to elaborate state and supranational systems that integrat ...
This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.As civlization developed, so did the need for units of measurement. Th ...
