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On 4/10/2010 3:21 AM, David Bradbury wrote:
According to www.britannica.fr/Lettre4/HistoireMesure.html
la lieue de 20 au degré = 2850 toises = 5 555 m.: également appelée
/grande lieue de France/ ou /lieue marine/ ou /*lieue d'une heure de
chemin*/.
I cannot help but wonder if the Britannica statement packages this too
neatly: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Measurement.html .
"In France, on the other hand, there was no standardisation and as
late as 1788 Arthur Young wrote in "/Travels during the years /1787,
1788, 1789" published in 1793:-
/In France the infinite perplexity of the measures exceeds all
comprehension. They differ not only in every province, but in
every district and almost every town./
In fact it has been estimated that France had about 800 different
names for measures at this time, and taking into account their
different values in different towns, around 250,000 differently
sized units. To a certain extent this reflected the powers which
resided in the hands of local nobles who had resisted all attempts
by the French King over centuries to standardise measures. Diderot
and d'Alembert
<http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Mathematicians/D%27Alembert.html>
in their /Encyclopédie/ greatly regretted the diversity, but saw no
possible acceptable solution to the problem. Some French scientists
had proposed uniform systems at least 100 years before the French
Revolution. Gabriel Mouton
<http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Mouton.html>, in
1670, had suggested that the world should adopt a uniform scale of
measurement based on the mille, which he defined as the length of
one minute of the Earth's arc. He proposed that decimal subdivisions
should be used to determine the lengths of shorter units of length.
Lalande
<http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Lalande.html>,
in April 1789, proposed that the measures used in Paris should
become national ones, an attempt at standardisation but not
rationalisation. This proposal was put to the National Assembly in
February 1790 but in March a different suggestion was made.
Talleyrand put to the National Assembly a proposal due to Condorcet
<http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Condorcet.html>,
namely that a new measurement system be adopted based on a length
from nature. The system should have decimal subdivisions, all
measures of area, volume, weight etc should be linked to the
fundamental unit of length. The basic length should be that of a
pendulum which beat at the rate of one second. The proposal was
adopted."
I am not attempting to assert any definitive accuracy for the above
statement, but given that the de Fer map-making family was deceased by
the early 18th century, it does not seem likely that the "lieue d'une
heure de chemin" was that well standardized at the time of the map's
production.
Joel Kovarsky
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