Meter to Picometer Converter

History of a Meter - The base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI).

Think about it we kind of pick today's select arbitrary length out of the air and used it to base all of our other measurements on. Most early measurements were based on body part things like the cubit that old timey biblical measure were based on the length from the tip of the finger to the elbow and you can add those together to make things like the stride

The main problem with this kind of unit of measurement is that not everyone's the same size, so it didn't take us very long to realize that we needed some sort of standardized system of measurement and there were a few attempts. The yardstick was one of the first attempts to get everybody on the same page in terms of measurement and actually anglo-saxon Kings were thought to have a yardstick. So something that they kept in the vaults for everybody to base their measurement on as early as the 10th century.

There's a brilliant story about King Henry the first deciding to make it the distance between his nose and his thumb but I feel like unless you've got access to a king that probes not super helpful. Other people decided to try and use things that most people had lying around instead of Kings. Most people had access to barley and actually the inch was supposed to be three of these lying end-to-end and you could add those together to get larger units. In practice though its balls are always super helpful plus different countries often had different kind of ways to standardize these measurements.

It got so bad that by the 1700s in France alone one country there were over 250,000 different ways to measure stuff, unlike you could go from one village to the next like literally next door and the person living next to you would have a completely different way of measuring stuff like this is not great. It was kind of a good system for the people that wanted to make money fast, if you think about it there are a lot of merchants who were probably cashing out a little bit and sell what they thought was a certain amount for more than it was worth or less than it was worth.

So for years the powers that be in France the royal family kept this situation going. Things kind of started looking up for people in 1789, not so much for the ruling class in France though. In the 1790s the Academy of Science in France the Academie des Sciences decided that they wanted to standardized measurement. Two hundred and fifty thousand different ways to measure distance and weight is too many they decided to implement what they called the International System of Units, so the French Revolution in some ways were as responsible for the metric system there were a few ideas about how they were going to standardize what they called the 'metre'.

The first idea was to use a pendulum which if you think about it makes a certain amount of sense like if you pull it back to us an angle and then let it go and then measure how far it swings that can be your meter and every person could make some sort of crude pendulum. Problem was scientists at this particular point in time we're very very aware that the earth was round and that gravity was a thing and so gravity was different depending on where you were in the world. So the pendulum idea while it seemed like a good one would end up giving you slightly different results wherever you were in the world. So after a bit of brainstorming the Academy of Sciences in France sent a couple of astronomers off on a ridiculously crazy and complicated surveying mission.

Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre and Pierre Méchain, they left in 1792 and a six-year journey, their aim was to measure what's called the meridian. The meridian is basically a quarter of the earth so in this case it was the line between the North Pole and the equator cutting through Paris the idea was to calculate the distance in Linea one of the 250,000 measures of distance then divide by 10 million to get the meter thing is it was impossible to measure the whole thing I mean there's a bunch of water in the way and the first successful trip to the North Pole didn't happen until 1908. So they chose two places running through Paris because well these guys were French so why not Barcelona in the south and Dunkirk in the north.

Mainly because these are the two places that are closest to sea level so if they could figure out an accurate distance between the two well then they'd be able to extrapolate that and then they'd be able to get the distance from the North Pole to the equator. The Earth's surface gets in the way first of all our planet is very definitely a sphere so at a certain point you lose sight of your surveying equipment due to the curvature of the earth, it's not like you can just point something in a direction and measure a straight line and to ramp up the difficulty level to nightmare the earth isn't select flat all the way around there are a whole bunch of dips and valleys and mountains in the way.

To get around this problem they used a technique that's actually still a thing today it's called triangulation if you know the angle between two points in the distance of one side of the triangle you can work out the rest, add them all together and you get an accurate distance. It took some six years and I mean they split up into two groups as well so one went north one went south and they decided to meet up in the middle later. It probably would have actually taken them less time if it weren't for the ridiculous amount of social upheaval happening at the time they could have rested multiple times I mean think about it you're in the middle of what's essentially a war and a revolution and then you've got a couple of people looking super dodgy walking around the countryside with weird instruments.

After they go back and after they had done all their calculations and announced the blanks of the meter the Academy of Sciences had a standard bar made up it's made out of iridium and platinum so that it would last as many years as possible up until about 20 years ago or so though that platinum and iridium bar was legitimately what we use to base all of our measurements on they sent a whole bunch of them around the world.

The picometre or picometer (SI symbol: pm) is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to 1×10⁻¹² m, or one trillionth of a metre, which is the SI base unit of length.

Formula 1:-

pm = m / 1.0E-12

Formula 2:-

pm = m * 1000000000000

Here's how to convert 5 Meter to Picometer using the formula 1 and formula 2.
Example:: 5 m = ? pm

Using Formula 1:-

5 m = (5 ÷ 1.0E-12) pm = 5000000000000 pm

Using Formula 2:-

5 m = (5 × 1000000000000) pm = 5000000000000 pm