At 11:56 +0100 18/08/2002, Markus Kuhn wrote: >Curious, the kilogram, meter and Amp�re seem to be the only SI base >units developed in France. > >Fahrenheit is an old German temperature scale, whereas the Celsius scale >originated in Sweden.
An excerpt of my book "La grande m�trication", chapter on SI (free translation): "Of course it was difficult to find out from Greek or Latin roots names for all these units, as this had been done for the meter and the gram. Therefore more than half of them received names of scientists: Newton, Coulomb,etc., or names derived from scientists' names : Volta (volt), Faraday (farad). This gives a raw map of the geopolitics of sciences in the last centuries: - United Kingdom takes the largest part with 9 units, from Isaac Newton, a mathematician, physicist and astronomer (1642-1727), to James Watt, an engineer and mechanist (1736-1819) and James Prescott Joule, a physicist and industrialist (1818-1889). Who hinted that Britons were not interested with the metric system? - Germany is well represented with 6 names, from the mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss (1775-1855) to the physicist Georg Simon Ohm (1787-1854) and the industrialist Ernst Werner von Siemens (1816-1892); - same score for France, with, amongst others, the scientist, philosopher and writer Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) qualified by Chateaubriand as "a terrifying genius", Andr�-Marie Amp�re from Lyons (1775-1836), and the physician Jean-Louis Poiseuille (1799-1869), well known from his book on Le Mouvement des liquides dans les tubes de petits diam�tres (liquid motion in small diameter tubes); - three names for Sweden, of whose Anders Celsius (1701-1744) and the physicist Anders Jonas �ngstr�m (1814-1874); - three also for Italy, for instance the physicist Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) who invented the electrical battery; - again three for the United States, such as the physicist Joseph Henry (1797) and the engineer Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922); - one for Denmark (Hans-Christian �rsted, 1777-1851) and one also for Croatia, Nikola Tesla, an engineer and physicist who lived mainly in the United States (1856-1943). But, among these 32 names, only one female: our great Marie Curie (1867-1934). Unfortunately the curie was replaced in 1975 by the becquerel - legislation on equal opportunity was not yet implemented... Per chance Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) was a French physicist, who shared in 1903 a Nobel Prize with Pierre and Marie Curie. Nobody either from the Arabic and Eastern civilizations..." Louis
