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 A uniform system?There was a clear case for a uniform system. The quest for such a system began in 800 AD under Charlemagne, but repeated attempts were never successful because of the competing claims of various regional authorities. Then in 1670, a church vicar, Fr Gabriel Mouton, proposed a system based on the scale of 10, which would build on the decimal fractions (also a scale of 10 !) which had recently come into popular use to supplement the Hindu-Arabic system of writing whole numbers. It could handle units and fractions of units within the number system, rather than requiring smaller units. Like many good new ideas, it was largely ignored, until the time of the French revolutionary period when things were ripe for reform. |
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