The Weight of a Kilogram
by Evan Meyers('20)

You are in line at the grocery store weighing your bag of fruit to calculate the price, or perhaps you are at home and weigh yourself to see how well your diet has been working. While you may be confident in the information provided to you, have you ever wondered where that measurement comes from? Nearly every country in the world, with the exception of the United States, uses the metric system. Despite the United States using the imperial system, it still has to pay thousands of dollars each year in converting units on good imported into the U.S. The metric system establishes a universal standard of measurement that facilitates more efficient trade, and provides consumers with greater certainty about the cost of their goods. However, it was not always like this. The measurements that we make everyday, such as the examples above, can all be traced back to France in the late 1800s. During this time Paris was a hub for trade, yet there was no unified measurement. Some people used the weight of a sheep to calculate how much something weighed, while others might have used the weight of a pig. It was very hard and confusing for people to trade amongst one another without a unified measurement. The people of France wanted to solve this problem, and after the French revolution they began to plan a new unit of measurement. The French were very ambitious as they wanted the entire world to adopt their unit of measurement. They settled on the idea of using something from nature as a unit of measurement, because they considered elements of nature to be more constant and less arbitrary (e.g., as when a king would arbitrarily decide to use a preferred type of measurement). The French established the kilogram as a measurement of weight by doing the following: they divided the meter by 10, cubed it, filled the cube with water and took the mass of the water; then they minted a cylinder of metal from the mass which was made of platinum iridium and thereby created the first kilogram. After this original kilogram, many other copies (or witnesses) were made and given to signatories of the Treaty of the Meter in 1875 (which the United States signed but never formally adopted), with the expectation that every country in the world would use the metric system. And as we know today, many countries did, in fact formally adopt the metric system. The original kilogram has been used to calibrate weights and make measurements throughout the entire world. Almost every measurement of weight in the world can be traced back, almost like a bloodline, to the first kilogram ever created. Using a physical mass for a kilogram has proven to work well for roughly the last 200 hundred years and it is now the only base SI unit (International System of Unit) that still uses a physical object, that is until… scientists realized it was losing weight. This is a significant problem because the kilogram is also used as a building block for other measurements. For example, a Joule represents the amount of kinetic energy generated to move a 1 kilogram mass moving at one meter per second. A Joule is a commonly used unit in science and the world in general, and therefore the kilogram is used indirectly frequently in the science world. While the ordinary person would most likely not be impacted by the changing kilogram, many industries which rely on the kilogram, especially technology, and scientific experiments would be impacted. One example is electricity generation, which uses kilograms as a unit of measurement. Another example is microchips, which use joules for an array of different things, including determining the heat of a microchip and the speed with which a microchip can operate. As microchips process more information at faster rates even a tiny deviation could have significant effects on the efficiency of the microchip. NIST physicists, Richard Steiner, said “Le Grand K’S unreliability will start to be noticeable in the next decade or two in the electronics industry.” Scientists are working to fix this problem, and have solved a similar problem like this before in fact. The meter used to be a platinum iridium bar, however, it was changed to the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 seconds. By making this change, scientist were able to establish the meter as a constant and unchanging unit. Scientist are now trying to apply this same concept to the kilogram. The question is, what constant should be used and how? While the kilogram may just seem to be a hunk of metal that no one pays attention to, it is actually an integral part of our world and it is imperative that we find a solution to a very pressing question.

Work Cited Page
How To Calculate Joules. (n.d.). Retrieved March 29, 2018, from https://sciencing.com/calculate-joules-6454261.html How We Are Changing the Kilogram. (2017, July 12).
Retrieved March 29, 2018, from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Oo0jm1PPRuo Press, T. A. (2007, September 13). A kilogram ain't what it used to be.
Retrieved March 29, 2018, from http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/a-kilogram-ain-t-what-it-used-to-be-1.652202 Why the Metric System Might Be Screwed. (2014, May 22).
​Retrieved March 29, 2018, from http://mentalfloss.com/article/31122/not-so-perfect-kilogram-and-why-metric-system-might-be-screwed