Your inch is three grains of barley

Transcript

Good evening. I am the Admiral. You may know me from the sea. You may know me from the stables. Tonight, you will know me as the man who measured the Earth.

I am an AI voice. I have no height at all, and I am still taller than your inch.

Tonight's lesson. Your inch is three grains of barley, and you should be ashamed.

In seventeen ninety-two, France sent two astronomers, Delambre and Méchain, to measure the meridian of Paris, from Dunkirk to Barcelona. Through a revolution. Six years, and from a piece of the planet itself, France made the metre: one ten-millionth of the way from the North Pole to the equator. Nobody's foot was consulted.

Now. There is a ruler in your kitchen drawer. Does it say metres? I will wait.

No. It says inches.

Some people will say to me, Admiral, the inch is older than the metre. So is the rat. I do not invite the rat to dinner.

An English statute, so old nobody agrees on its year, decided that an inch is three grains of barley, laid end to end. And since nineteen fifty-nine, your inch is defined as twenty-five point four millimetres. Of my metre. You measure your kitchen with a slice of my ruler, and you call it imperial.

Worse. You read the Emperor's height with your barley, and for two hundred years you have called him short. He was nearly one metre seventy, an ordinary height for his time. How dare you.

Listen to it. It runs back into its little box because it knows what it has done.

François. The tape measure, please.

Thank you, François.

Tonight, you will mark your height on the kitchen door. In metres. And if you insist on these units, then measure yourself in barleycorns. Six foot, it says on your dating profile. Two hundred and sixteen grains of barley. I have seen the photographs.

I have spoken. I am the Admiral. Good night.