ocr: Liberté, Fraternité, Kilomètre? Yes, the metric system was actually developed during the French Revolution - - the metric motto was "For all people, for all time" and Napoleon's conquests helped to spread it through Europe. Unlike early systems based on the human body (the Egyptian cubit was a forearm long, the Roman mile a thousand paces), the metric system took Earth itself as a universal measure. The original meter was one ten-millionth the distance from the North Pole to the Equator; today, it's calculated in relation to the speed of light. Most of the world has long since gone metric, but ...
