The secretary of state at the time was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson knew about a new French system and thought it was just what America needed. He wrote to his pals in France, and the French sent a scientist named Joseph Dombey off to Jefferson carrying a small copper cylinder with a little handle on top. It was about 3 inches tall and about the same wide.
This object was intended to be a standard for weighing things, part of a weights and measure system being developed in France, now known as the metric system. The object’s weight was 1 kilogram.
Crossing the Atlantic, Dombey ran into a giant storm.
“It blew his ship quite far south into the Caribbean Sea,” says Martin.
And you know who was lurking in Caribbean waters in the late 1700s? Pirates.
