 (UTC)  Standardization began with the Letter of Nance. The idea was that measures were legal definitions of property so every time you changed one somebody made money and somebody lost money. Obviously this made them somewhat resistant to change to the point where the original definition of abomination in the bible is illegitimate standards of measure. Genesis 14: discusses this in Akadian as regards orla omer in the time of Hamurabbi and Rim Sin. First came body measures, fingers, palms, hands, feet, cubits; then agricultural measures, feet, yards, rods, cords, furlongs, navigational measures, yards, fathoms, furlongs, miles, degrees; then measures of symetry and proportion; then combinations of time and space such as a days sail which was commonly taken as one geographic degree of 75 Roman miles.  A Mesopotamian hand was 100 mm, a foot three hands or 300 mm and a cubit 500 mm or one half meter, a great cubit was 2 feet or 600 mm and 2 cubits was one meter. That was a sexigesimal system. The Egyptian system was septenary. An Egyptian palm was 75 mm, a foot four palms or 300 mm, and an ordinary cubit 450 mm while a royal cubit was 525 mm and a nibw or elle was 2 feet or 600 mm As discussed by Herodotus in the Histories Book II, The Greeks and Persians followed the Mesopotamian system and the Romans the Egyptian system.   Investigations into the seconds pendulum began with Galileo (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642)about 1581 and were incorporated into Queen Elizabeth I's decree of 1593 making the English Mile 8 furlongs of 660 feet replacing the Myle of 8 furlongs of 625 Roman feet or 185 meters which was a myle or Roman milliare of 1000 paces or 5000 feet with a new mile of 5280 feet such that there were defined twice as many seconds in a century as inches in the circumference of the earth at the Equator.   01:45, 21 July 2015