Who invented the Metric system

[sunflower71]

Who invented the metric system?

[Clanad]

Here in the U.S., the USMA (US Metric Association) says the following:
Most historians agree that Gabriel Mouton, the vicar of St. Paul's Church in Lyons, France, is the �founding father� of the metric system. He proposed a decimal system of measurement in 1670. Mouton based it on the length of one minute of arc of a great circle of the Earth (now called a nautical mile, 1852 meters). He also proposed the swing-length of a pendulum with a frequency of one beat per second as the unit of length (about 25 cm). A pendulum beating with this length would have been fairly easy to produce, thus facilitating the widespread distribution of uniform standards. Over the years, his work was revised, improved, and extended by a number of French scientists.

The political sponsor of weights and measures reform in the French Revolutionary National Assembly was the Bishop of Autun, better known as Talleyrand. Under his auspices, the French Academy appointed several committees to carry out the work of developing a usable system of weights and measures for France. One of the committees recommended a decimalized measurement system based upon a length equal to one ten-millionth of the length of a quadrant of the earth's meridian (i.e., one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the North Pole).

[Peter Pedant]

The John Rylands Library here in Manchester has Proceedings of the Manchester Philosophical Society just sort of lying about on the shelves.
They had about three series for the end of the eighteenth century - all that means is that they have Vol 1 three times between 1790 and 1810.

I went through a few to see if John Dalton - he of the atomic theory had addressed the Society on his erm atomic theory. (Yes he had)

and lo and behold there are articles around 1792 explaining the new metric system. New for 1792 that is !

The authors then seemed to think it came from a committee

[jno]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system

lots of stuff there but no single answer to your question

[gobbledegeek]

Recent research seems to indicate that the basis of decimal (metric) measurement was first proposed by an English scientist, Dr John Wilkins, in 1668 - more than 100 years before the French adopted it. See http://www.ukma.org.uk/whatis/brits.htm