Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.

Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren’t they?

    • sparkle@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      The calorie used to be the base unit, until we released in the 19th century “wait, heat isn’t a gas” and threw out caloric theory, and made the joule. Now the calorie is defined as 4.184 joules.

      • MewtwoLikesMemes@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Yes, you’re right. There have multiple iterations of the “metric system” since it’s introduction in 1892–1895, most notably the original 1795 draft variant, then the CGS (Centimeter-Gram-Second) version, then the MKS (meter-kilogram-second) variant, with the most recent incarnation being the International System of Units (SI).

        That’s why there are plenty of metric units, but not all of them are SI units.