The first practical application of the metric system was the system implemented by the French revolutionaries at the end of the 18th century. Its main characteristics were the following:
• The magnitude of its units is derived from nature.
• Your organization was decimal.
• Units that have different dimensions are related to each other in a rational way.
• Prefixes are used to denote multiples and submultiples of units.
These characteristics had already been explored and exposed by several scholars in the two centuries prior to the implementation of the French Metric System.
The first proposal to introduce a decimal system for universal use in Europe is attributed to Simon Stevin. However, twentieth-century treatises such as Bigourdan (France, 1901) and McGreevy (United Kingdom, 1995) propose the French clergyman Gabriel Mouton (1670) as creator of the idea of a metric system.