I think that this is an insidious anti-metric effort. O And I wonder if this anti-metric historian has ever heard about the Mendenhall Order and the 1959 agreement and whether he knows about the present US standards for length an mass. Mr. Adler should clamour for the abandonment of these standards if the meter is an error. Pointing to the small errors made in that time is one of the methods by the ifp boys to stir up resistance to the metric system. Mechain did not keep secrets, but until his death he tried to correct the error. He did not have the time.
Han ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, 2002-08-30 3:50 Subject: [USMA:21975] Mechain and the metre > 2002 Aug 29 > The Fall 2002 issue of American Heritage of Invention & Technology has an article about the survey from Dunkirk to Barcelona to size the metre. The article, by one Ken Adler, reports that Mechain made a mistake in finding the latitude at the south end of his survey. He could not repeat the value of a year before. He kept this secret. After the death of Mechain, Delambre turned in only the results of the survey, not the details. > > Adler makes unneeded remarks. In large type the article says "The meter, it turns out, is a mistake." Adler speaks of Mechain's "duplicity". The "mistake" is about 2 parts in 10 000, not enough to call for bad words. > > I quote from the end of the article, "Ken Adler is associate professor of history at Northwestern University. His book on the origins of the metric system, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and the Hidden Error that Transformed the World, is being published by the Free Press in October 2002." > > The error did not transform the world. I hope the book gets Prof. Adler his promotion but I can not call him a good historian. > > ------------------------------------- > The article has a good picture of the "cercle repetiteur", which also appears on page 41 of L'Aventure du Metre, but I can not figure out how it works. Somebody, tell me how it works; what is repeated? Robert Bushnell
