1st Standards Webinar

“Coming up to Standards”, Series of Lectures in Celebration of 53rd World Standards Day

Alphabetic writing started three millennia ago in the Sinai Peninsula, and continued in ancient Phoenicia, Israel, Greece, and Italy. The Latin alphabet was developed in the Roman Empire and its symbols and letters have been changing over the last millennium, but they have become the main global script today. A similar development occurred with numbers and their symbols—numerals. The Egyptians had been the first to use the ciphered numeral system, followed by Greeks’ numbers and the Roman numeral system which had combined several letters of the Roman alphabet into numbers which were used in Europe until the end of the 14th century when the Hindu-Arabic numeral system started to substitute them; it spread out to the whole world at the present.

Weights and measures were the next groups that evolved with human development. A unit of measurement was agreed upon, most often imposed by a national sovereign or international emperor. In the beginning, the measures were based on the human body, e.g., inch, foot, or natural phenomena, e.g., day, year. The French revolution brought up the metric, decimal system. It was initiated in 1792 and the first prototypes of meter and kilogram were standardized in 1799. In 1861 coherent measurement units were introduced with the units of length (centimeter), mass (gram), and time (second). In 1875 the Meter Convention was signed by 17 member states. In 1901 the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) declared a kilogram as a unit of mass, not of weight. In 1960, the CGPM accepted the International System of Units (Système International d’Unités, SI) with four additional “base units”: second for a time duration, ampere for electric current, kelvin for thermodynamic temperature, and candela for luminous intensity; 16 “derived units” with special names were accepted, too. The seventh base unit, mole for amount of substance was accepted by the CGPM in 1971. Six additional derived units with special names have been gradually adopted, bringing their number to 22.

The system of quantities was the last to be developed and standardized globally. Quantity is a property of a phenomenon, body, or substance, where the property has a magnitude that can be expressed by means of a number and a reference (unit). In 1988, the International Organization for Standardization, ISO, in cooperation with the International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC, published the first edition of the international standard ISO 31 Quantities and units in 14 parts, and ISO 1 000 SI units and recommendations for use. In 1992 both standards were substituted by ISO 80000 Quantities and units. After having worldwide acceptable letters, numerals, and measurement units we already have the International System of Quantities (ISQ), which was legally accepted by members from 165 countries (including the UK and USA). The authors of scientific journals and journal lectors shall use the International System of Units (SI) for all dimensional quantities and respect the ISO 80000 standard rules on the names and symbols of quantities and units.

Date: 28 September 2022

Time: 2:00pm CEST | 8:00am EDT | 8:00pm CST Asia

Webinar ID: 875 7927 9918

Webinar Secretariat: standards.webinar@mdpi.com