What's the origin of the meter and the metric system?

Factual Questions
1

As I understand it, the French wanted to divide the righangle into 100 decimal degrees and a decimal degree into 100 decimal minutes. This means that there would be 10,000 (100x100) decimal minutes in a right angle or a 10,000 decimal minutes of arc on the earth’s surface between the equatoir and the north pole. There definition of a kilometre was one of these decimal minutes.

Can anyone comment on this?

Since they only got the distance approximately correct, if we had moved to the decimal angle measure, we would be talking about nautical kilometres. As it happens a nautical mile is a regular minute of arc on the earths surface so there are 5400 (90x60) nautical miles between the equator and the pole. Nothing to do with a regular mile which depended on the length of some king’s arm.

2

A Staff Report on this very topic.

3

I read this. The reason for my question is the origin of the 10,000,000 which is the number of the metres in an earth quadrant.

I believe that the reason was for navigation in that a sextant calibrated in decimal degrees and minutes would have measured distances at sea in nautical kilometres.

As it happens, decimal degrees and minutes didn’t catch on!