History of the metre

Okay kiddo, so a long time ago, people used all kinds of different measurements for length. They might use their own foot or hand as a unit of measurement. But it got kind of tricky because not everyone's foot or hand was the same size!

So some really smart people got together and decided it would be a good idea to have one standard unit of measurement that everyone could use. They wanted it to be based on something that was always the same, no matter where you went in the world.

Now they thought about using the Earth itself as a reference point. So they decided to measure a straight line from the North Pole to the equator and divide it into ten million equal parts. Each part would be a "metre."

That might sound like a lot of math, but they used some special tools and calculations to figure it all out. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks already used similar concepts to define their units of measurements for trade.

So in 1795, the French government took this idea and officially adopted the metre as their standard unit of measurement. It soon spread throughout Europe and eventually became the international standard.

Now, every time you measure something using a ruler or tape measure, you're using the metre as your unit of measurement. Pretty neat, huh?