A Matter of Degrees

[Oliver Xymoron]

On Thu, 25 Sep 1997, Sherwood, Harrison wrote:

> An interesting side issue here is the metric system, which, although not
> officially adopted by the scientific world until after the French
> Revolution, would certainly have been in the Enlightenment air of the
> 1760s. Designed to replace hundreds of highly localized and irrational
> and incompatible weights and measures, it calibrated itself on natural
> phenomena such as the boiling point of water, the weight of one cubic
> centimeter of water, etc. 
> 
> My memory is a little flawed on the details, and Web-searches are
> shooting blanks, but wasn't the meter originally based on a certain
> subdivision of the distance from the Equator to the Pole? And is this
> not suggestive? Does this not bring us, as it were, full circle? Why not
> a *metric* geometry? Why isn't a degree of terrestrial arc a certain
> number of kilometers, perfectly divisible by 10?

That'd be 10 million meters, or 10,000km. There is in fact a unit called a
'gradian' which divides a circle into 400 degrees, about 100km/grad on the
earth's surface. I recall seeing a highschool math textbook from the UK
which was based on gradians. 

BTW, 360 degrees probably comes from the Babylonian calendar - 12 months
of 30 days each. They introduced all those sixties and twelves into our
time system. 

--
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