Metre Convention
In 1884, at the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC, the Greenwich meridian was adopted as the prime meridian of the world. San Domingo, now the Dominican Republic, voted against. France and Brazil abstained. The United Kingdom acceded to the Metre Convention in 1884 and to the International Geodetic Association in 1898. In 1911, Alexander Ross Clarke and Friedrich Robert Helmert stated in the Encyclopædia Britannica :