Grave (mass)

Grave, shortened as gv, was the word that was used to describe mass before the word kilogram was introduced. Grave comes from the word gravity and was first used in 1793 in France. The name kilogram was introduced in 1795 but was not the official word for mass until 1875.

In order to have full consistency in the International System of Units (SI), many people think that the kilogram should be called something different. Using the word kilogram creates a problem because it is a base unit that has the prefix "kilo" already in its name. To fix the problem, some people have suggested using the word grave again.

Grave (mass) Media

• 

  One of the original prototypes of the grave made in 1793 and now kept at the NIST Museum

• 

  The Arago kilogram, a copy of the Kilogramme des Archives commissioned in 1821 by the US under supervision of French physicist François Arago that served as the US's first kilogram standard of mass.

Other websites

• http://www.bipm.org/en/si/history-si/name_kg.html Archived 2014-08-07 at the Wayback Machine
• http://www.utc.fr/~tthomass/Themes/Unites/hist/Histoire%20du%20systeme%20metrique.pdfArchived 2018-06-12 at the Wayback Machine
• http://www.utc.fr/~tthomass/Themes/Unites/prehist/GBigourdan.pdfArchived 2018-06-12 at the Wayback Machine