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The Meter, Golden Ratio, Pyramids, and Cubits, Oh My
The French originated the meter in the 1790s as one/ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole along a meridian through Paris. It is realistically represented by the distance between two marks on an iron bar kept in Paris. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures, cr...
Yet just a few years ago, the late Pat Naughtin discovered that the proposal for a universal standard of length very close to the metre may in fact have originated much earlier, via Bishop John Wilkins, an English cleric and philosopher, and a member of the Royal Society, in the mid-1600s. Used to set out the Great Pyramid, its length measures 524 mm, or 0.524 m. For anyone hoping to see a nice round relationship between the cubit and the metre, I’m afraid the story is much more complicated than that! in its geometry – this was discovered by Englishman John Taylor in 1859, when he found that if you divide half the length of the Pyramid’s base perimeter by its height, you end up with ?.
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