Switzerland has been measuring in metres and weighing in kilograms for exactly 150 years. On May 20, 1875, Switzerland signed ...

NARRATOR: The metric system is a way of measuring things. So with length, the metric measurements are millimetres, centimetres, metres and kilometres. A stamp, would be measured in millimetres.

Units of one measure, such as length, increased by powers of ten (millimeters ... but a system of standards. It survives today as the metric system.

But the world's measurements were, frankly, a mess. France had introduced the metric system during its revolutionary years, but other nations were slow—or outright unwilling—to adopt it.

All words are made up, after all, and the words for measurements are more made up than most. But these words didn't follow the precepts of the metric system, the official standard for demarcating ...

That’s because I-19 is the only American highway that fully measures distance in kilometers, a relic of a failed effort in the 1970s for the U.S. to adopt the metric system. Some 50 years later ...