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  2. History of the metric system - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metric_system

    Apart from the obvious nationalistic considerations, the Paris meridian was also a sound choice for practical scientific reasons: a portion of the quadrant from Dunkirk to Barcelona (about 1000 km, or one-tenth of the total) could be surveyed with start- and end-points at sea level, and that portion was roughly in the middle of the quadrant ...

  3. Kilometre - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilometre

    The kilometre (SI symbol: km; / ˈ k ɪ l ə m iː t ər / or / k ɪ ˈ l ɒ m ə t ər /), spelt kilometer in American and Philippine English, is a unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), equal to one thousand metres (kilo-being the SI prefix for 1000).

  4. League (unit) - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_(unit)

    It was common in Europe and Latin America, but is no longer an official unit in any nation. Derived from an ancient Celtic unit and adopted by the Romans as the leuga, the league became a common unit of measurement throughout western Europe. Since the Middle Ages, many values have been specified in several countries, ranging from 2.2 km (1.4 mi ...

  5. History of measurement - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_measurement

    The comparison of the dimensions of buildings with the descriptions of contemporary writers is another source of information. An interesting example of this is the comparison of the dimensions of the Greek Parthenon with the description given by Plutarch from which a fairly accurate idea of the size of the Attic foot is obtained. Because of the ...

  6. List of European countries by area - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries...

    Below is a list of European countries and dependencies by area in Europe. [1] As a continent, Europe's total geographical area is about 10 million square kilometres. [2] Transcontinental countries are ranked according to the size of their European part only, excluding Greece due to the not clearly defined boundaries of its islands between ...

  7. History of cartography - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cartography

    What Colbert lacked in his pursuit of the development of the economy was a map of the entire country. France, like all other countries of Europe, operated on local knowledge. Within France, there were local systems of measuring weight and taxes; a uniform notion of land surveying did not exist.

  8. History of longitude - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude

    Detail of nautical chart of Paita, Peru, showing the telegraphic longitude determination made in 1884 [102] The U.S. Navy expanded the web into the West Indies and Central and South America in four expeditions in the years 1874–90. One series of observations linked Key West, Florida with the West Indies and Panama City. [103]

  9. Early world maps - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps

    Curiously, the labels for Africa and Europe are reversed, with Europe scribed in red and gold as 'Africa', and vice versa. An open-access high-resolution digital image of the map with more than 1,000 place and name annotations is included among the thirteen medieval maps of the world edited in the Virtual Mappa project.