Word: metered
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...glass, hard rubber and wood, they will find, safe & sound, they hope, the venerated object: a softly gleaming bar of platinum-iridium. On its polished surface are two fine lines. When the bar's temperature is zero degrees centigrade, the distance between those lines is exactly one meter (39.37 inches...
Lined Bar. This is THE meter: the standard length in terms of which all the world's measurements are defined. Even men who speak in pounds or poods, kilometers or versts, acres or mu depend ultimately upon the meter bar in Paris. The subtler units of measurement, such as dynes, electron-volts and curies, are based...
When the metric system was devised by French revolutionists in 1791, its fundamental unit, the meter ("measure" in Greek), was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the earth's poles and its equator. Since this distance is hard to determine accurately, it was abandoned, and the standard meter bar put in its place. Most nations have copies of it. Even the stiff-necked British check their "standard foot" against the meter...
...Paris meter bar has served the world well, but there are two things wrong with it. Modern techniques of measurement make the fine engraved lines on the bar seem coarse and irregular. Then too, many scientists feel that the metric system should not be based on an arbitrary length, but upon some length taken from nature itself. Then, if all the meter bars were destroyed (by atomic war, for instance), the standard could be reestablished, as good as ever, when the radioactive smoke had cleared away...
Speaking at the inauguration of Dr. Ralph A. Van Meter as president of the University of Massachusetts, president Conant complimented the university on its two-year agricultural college in Stockbridge--a thirty year old venture that pioneered the development of shorter courses in specialized fields...