Word: vres
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Normally closefisted, Louis showered money on her innumerable "projects"-the porcelain factory of Sèvres, paintings, sculptures, villas, rewards and pensions for artists and builders-a grand total, it is said, of 36 million livres. "He doesn't mind signing for a million," she told her maid, "but he hates to part with little sums out of his pocket...
Among science's most sacred relics are the standard "meter bars" of platinum-iridium that lie in an underground shrine at Sèvres, near Paris. Replacing a babel of medieval units, they originated in the spurt of innovation that followed the French Revolution. The newfangled meter was intended to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the earth's equator and the North Pole, but difficulties of measurement made the exact length hard to determine. So the meter that was finally accepted (39.37 in. in length) was almost as arbitrary a unit as the ells, feet...
...century and a half the meter, defined as the average distance between microscopic lines on a master meter bar, was good enough. Then science began to demand more exact measurements. Last week a ten-nation advisory committee meeting at Sèvres recommended that the hallowed meter bars be abandoned in favor of wave lengths of light. Next year a full-dress international conference will make the final decision. It will probably doom the meter bars...