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From: owner-qrp-l at Lehigh.EDU [mailto:owner-qrp-l at Lehigh.EDU]On Behalf Of
Mike Yetsko
Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 11:05 AM
To: Low Power Amateur Radio Discussion
Subject: OT: Pico and Nano


OK, this MAY be an answer...

According to an article written by Asimov in November of 1962 called
"Pre-Fixing it Up", the original French metric definitions only covered
6 orders of magnitude.  They went from the meter 'down' to 10E-3
and 'up' to 10E+3, using Greek for the up prefixes and Latin for the
down prefixes.

English        Greek        Latin
Thousand    chilioi    mille
hundred    hecaton    centum
ten        deka        decem

which then became (in meters)
    kilometer
    hectometer
    dekameter
    meter
    decimeter
    centimeter
    milimeter

'ch' is a 'hard' sound, and became 'k'.

Other prefixes came later.

It wasn't until 1958 that the International Committee on Weights and
Measures agreed upon a formalized list as follows:

trillion        tera-        10E12
billion        giga-        10E9
million        mega-    10E6
thousand    kilo-        10E3
one                            10E0
thousandth    milli-    10E-3
millionth    micro-    10E-6
billionth    nano-    10E-9
trillionth    pico-    10E-12

femto-  10E-15 and  atto- 10E-18  were added in 1962.

(The 'trillion' referenced here is JUST for US reference, as 'trillion'
means a different value in the UK.)

I do not know if more have been added since, as the article was
written in 1962, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Mike

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