3 ms·

I'm surprised there's no mention of the relationship between time and the origin of the metric system in this article. Interestingly enough, it takes a 1-meter

I'm surprised there's no mention of the relationship between time and the origin of the metric system in this article. Interestingly enough, it takes a 1-meter pendulum 1 second to swing from side to side, no matter how high you raise it. Mechanical clocks relied on pendulum motion to keep time, and so the meter was created (at least partly) to standardize the size of the pendulum needed to create an accurate clock! Now that's an interesting story.

taejo 12y ago
> it takes a 1-meter pendulum 1 second to swing from side to side, no matter how high you raise it If I remember correctly, this is true if sin x = x; IOW, "how high you raise it" is exactly what takes you away from this approximation being true. Also, the meter was also originally defined as 1/10 000 000 of the distance from the north pole to the equator. It just so happens that these two come pretty close (it turns out that they had a big error in their measurement; a quarter-circumference of the earth is closer to 12 000 km than 10 000).