THE BIRTH OF THE METRO

In this post I want to show what happened to create a standard measure of the meter and the kilogram. This information for children can be very interesting because it is a very peculiar story and also, through it, we can create a lot of dynamics.

After much thought, the scientists agreed that the unit of measurement should have to do with the planet Earth. And they proposed: why not make the unit of length be ten millionth of a quarter of Earth's meridian?.

For a terrestrial meridian is the distance that goes from the North Pole to the South Pole and back to the North Pole, that is, a complete return to the planet through both poles. The Academy of Sciences, entrusted a group of adventurers who were to measure, not a whole meridian, which is very long, but a quarter of a meridian, which is still quite. These meters measured the distance from the city of Dunkirk, FRANCE, to that of Barcelona, ​​Spain.

From that measurement and by astronomical observations it was possible to calculate the length of the quarter of the terrestrial meridian. That number was divided by ten million. The length that resulted from that account was used to make a platinum bar baptizing it with the name of meter.

Then, several copies of the pattern meter were made and stored in a security vault, protected from rust, cold, heat and thieves. It was also decided that the kilogram would, by definition, be the weight of the water that fits in a cube one tenth of a meter on the side (that is, 10 centimeters). A standard weight of exactly one kilogram was also built and stored along with the meter. From that moment, all the measurements were comparisons with that bar and that platinum weight.

As I said at the beginning, through this story we can create a multitude of dynamics with the children in class.

One of them, which can be quite fun, is to play at being scientists and creating our own standard measure, which can be with some important object of the class or something similar, and make some measurements with it. For children, this type of dynamics can be very entertaining because it involves them directly in their own learning, which makes it very significant.