Brief History of the Metric System

Carmen J. Giunta is professor of chemistry emeritus at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, where he taught from 1990 through 2019. He is a physical chemist by training, having earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Harvard in 1989 working with Roy G. Gordon. He has been active in the ACS Division of the History of Chemistry since the late 1990s. He is editor of the Division’s journal, the Bulletin for the History of Chemistry. His interest in units and their history led him to serve for a decade on the ACS Committee on Nomenclature, Terminology, and Symbols. During that time he organized a symposium on the history of units (2011 ACS Spring National Meeting) and published papers in the Journal of Chemical Education on the mole and the redefined International System (SI) of units and in Substantia on names of units. He is co-editor with Vera V. Mainz and Gregory S. Girolami, of 150 Years of the Periodic Table: A Commemorative Symposium (2021) in Springer’s Perspectives on theHistory of Chemistry series.

• Introduction: Decimal Ideas before Revolutionary France.- Reform of Weights and Measures in Revolutionary France.- Metrication in France and Beyond: the Meter Goes International.- The Système International d’Unités (SI) of 1960.- Changes in the SI from its Introduction (1960) to the Explicit-Constant Revision (2019).- The Metric System and the United States.