Talk:Gabriel Mouton

message: This article survived a Vote for Deletion. The discussion can be found here. -Splash 02:10, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Vote for Deletion

message: The references used for this article have certain discrepancies which should be mentioned. Some of this material may belong in the article proper. (See also User_talk:Egil/Sandbox/Gabriel_Mouton):
#Connor and Robertson claims that the milliare unit is based on the degree, but this is most likely an error. It is contrary to all other sources, and does also not match the pendulum definition or the similarity to the toise.
#Bigourdan says that the virgula pendulum would oscillate 3959.2 times in half an hour (une demi-heure). If one interprets oscillation as full cycle, which is the current understanding, this would make the length of the pendulum ~5.1 cm, which is clearly incorrect. The likely explanation is that oscillation should be interpreted as change of direction, i.e. twice the number of cycles, just like the historical one second pendulum which has a period of 2 seconds. In this case, the resulting pendulum length becomes ~20.5 cm, which matches other findings.
#The NASA/NIST document with John Quincy Adams on the history of measures in its previous form claims Mouton used a one second pendulum, but other sources, including Bigourdan, who writes about Mouton in much more detail, says otherwise. Using a one second pendulum would complicate matters, since the length of a one second pendulum would correspond to 4.846 virgulas, which would make construction of a virgula standard beam based on a pendulum hard to do with a high level of accuracy. Using the pendulum described by Bigourdan, one would arrive at the desired length directly. (The NASA document is now updated).
#The pendulum calculation presented is based on a g of 9.80665, which is a standard for 45.542 degrees of latitude . The city of Lyon (the location of the Saint-Paul cathedral where Moutone worked) is very close to this latitude (at ), and at suffiently low altitude to make the result accurate to more than 4 digits.
#There are sources that claims that a virgula is 18.5 cm. This seems to be a case of a historian's fallacy. It would have been a likely value if Moutons definition was made at a time when the Earths circumference was known to a high accuracy. But as Bigourdan points out, the figure Mouton used was from Riccioli, and the pendulum used as the practical embodiment confirms the length of Moutons virgula as ~20.5 cm. The virgula lived only as a proposal, and there has been no attempt to redefine the virgula after Mouton. 
#Ferdinand Hoefer: Historie de l'astronomie, Paris 1873, confirms that the error of Ricicoli was more than 10000 meters per degree . Assuming a Bologna foot is 38 cm, Ricicolis result was 122 km per degree (compared to 111 km), which matches this claim well. One can say that Mouton was unfortuneate to have used the figures from Riccioli, which turned out to be ~10% in error. But again, this is hindsight. At the time, the results of Riccoli, published in Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae libri (1661), must have appeared as the  more authorative.
#Arthur D. Butterfield: A History of the Determination of the Figure of the Earth from Arc Measurements, Davis Press in Worcester, Massachusetts 1906, quotes an Earth radius of 4265.9 miles for Riccioli, which would result in a virgula of ~19.97 cm. It has been noted that Butterfields unit conversion factors are not always very accurate .
#The Galileo project at Rice says this about Moutons suggestion :
#::A fraction of the terrestrial meridian would be adopted as the universal unit of length. The measuring procedures at the time were too unsatisfactory. The topic wouldn't be taken up again until 1790.
  -- Egil 07:18, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comments about the references 

message: Based on the findings of the arbitration commity (see Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Rktect#Remedies), it seems consensus is reached with regards to this article, and I have thus removed the disputed tag. -- Egil 16:54, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dispute tag removed 

message: This article was automatically  assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 03:29, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  WikiProject class rating

message: Goodness what a furor. I made some format changes so the article will be formatted more in line with other developed articles and also I added the measurement box at the bottom, as this article as it NOW is appears to be a measurement article. There is one slight content change. Almost in the same breath the article says the Metric System of 1799 was based on Mouton, but a similar system was proposed two years earlier. Also, Leibnitz proposed a similar system independently. Evidemtly Mouton contributed to the two ideas about natural standards of length, Earth's circumference and pendulum, but the case would need to be made that the National Assembly was influenced by Mouton in its vote of 1799, which adopted the Metric System. So I made a slight alteration in wording. Too bad I could not find a nice portrait of Mouton. There might be a painting listed under the painter but not Mouton.Branigan 10:22, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Format changes 

message: I added a table, in an attempt to improve readability. Then I noticed that there is confusion over the approximate values, which should be tidied up -- I mean, we may not know which was the "correct" value, but there should not be different figures in different places without explanation. Please (whoever you are, you surely know more about this than I do) feel free to update the table. Thanks. Imaginatorium (talk) 16:54, 25 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Table of units 

message: Someone created an entry for each of these units, which I am in the process of redirecting here. The articles are full of inaccuracy and confusion, and in any event since the units were never adopted it makes sense to have them all within a coherent explanation of the system. That's: Milliare Centuria (unit) Decuria (unit) Virga (unit) Virgula (omitted) Decima Centessima (misspelt) Millesima(Somewhere it told me to put a note on the target talk page!) Imaginatorium (talk) 17:03, 25 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redirects from entries for units 

message: Robert Nord Eckert (talk) 03:41, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discrepancy accounted for