JohnD wrote:Paul-R wrote: This dates back to Napoleon who decided that he wanted to change things for change's sake just to show how powerful he was.
Not only did he change sides, he changed from miles to kiloms.
It wasn't Napoleon but the French Revolutionaries who tried to change everything to a "rational" basis. The currency, the clock, the calendar, weights and measures. Driving on the right was just a minor matter. Strangely, the one fundamental change that never seems to have been contemplated was to change the number base from 10 to say 12 or 8 either of which make more sense.
The revolutionary clock of 10 hours of 100 minutes and 100 seconds in a day lasted less than a year, the republican
calendar lasted a bit longer (1795 - 1805) - but we still live with the rest of the revolutionary lunacy.
The metre was supposed to be one ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole along the Paris meridian. Even allowing for a small error, the metre (first proposed by John Wilkins over 100 years earlier just happened to be almost exactly the same as the one unit of measure common across Europe and American - the cloth yard of 39½ inches.
Napolean's role in all this was that by conquering virtually the whole of continental Europe, and eventually placing various brothers and generals as puppet kings on major European thrones. These governments imposed the new French system on the hapless occupied nations. By 1815, when peace came after 20 years of war across Europe, reverting to the old systems was just too troublesome and expensive.