From The Washington Post, Sunday, April 1, 2001:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17404-2001Mar30.html
Note -- this article won't be viewable (free, anyway) after April 14.
It begins:
The door to room A-60 is locked until the face of Group Leader Zeina J.
Jabbour appears in the window to check us out.
We are late, but expected, and are quickly admitted to the quiet gray sanctum
that is the portal to the hallowed object. Beyond here we may not go. The
alarm to the inner chamber is "armed," and Jabbour is one of only a few
permitted to enter and take up the sacred tongs.
Human hands may not touch the object, lest it become altered in the slightest
nano-way, and the air inside is filtered of all but dust particles a
half-micron in diameter, or less.
Jabbour, its "keeper," already has entered, wearing a special blue "clean
suit." She has opened the safe, and carried the object on its black tray
under its glass dome to the viewing window.
"That thing?" we ask, peering in at a plain but gleaming silver-colored
cylinder about the size of a squat pill bottle.
"That," she says: the thick slice of platinum-iridium alloy, crafted by
French instrument makers about 1889, the only solid object in the country
still used to define a measure.
It's the National Kilogram.
Primal, untainted by dirt, lint, the weight of a fingerprint, the calamity of
a smudge. The immaculate kilo. The ultimate standard against which lesser
kilos across the land may be compared. The official foundation, born of the
French Revolution, on which the peculiar American system of ounces, pounds
and tons is built. The cosmic sire of every bathroom scale in the country.
{"Peculiar" is in the original!]
Carleton
