The French Revolution ushered in the metric system as we might recognize it. It was advocated by the French Academy as a necessary logical structure, a way of marking progress but also sweeping away an estimated hundreds of thousands of distinct measures used throughout the nation. The French savants envisioned a system built on a natural unit and eventually settled on one derived from measuring the distance across the Earth from the equator to the North Pole, essentially a quarter of a full circle of longitude.

Yet the metric system didn’t sweep the globe immediately, and many resisted it. Some of their reasons were different than ours—illiterate peasants were more comfortable working in fractions, for instance, than the more abstract decimal system—but others still have a certain allure. Many complained that metric numbers feel sterile and scientific, and in a way, they do. By contrast, traditional measures are derived from the scale of the human: A foot is based on our foot. That being said, we no longer use a cubit (length of a forearm). I’m not sure the world is poorer for it.

The metric system slowly came to be adopted by various countries through a combination of revolution, conquest and colonialism, thanks especially to the legacy of Napoleon (who also advanced a certain standardization of the legal code). While sometimes getting bogged down in details, Mr. Marciano traces the never-ending bureaucratic process by which proposals and counterproposals for new measures were sorted out.