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Many scientific units are named after scientists, for example,

  • Tesla for magnetic flux

  • Farad for capacitance

  • Newton for force.

When did the tradition of naming scientific units begin?

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1 Answer 1

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History of the metric system - Wikipedia says:

In 1861, Charles Bright and Latimer Clark proposed the names of ohm, volt, and farad in honour of Georg Ohm, Alessandro Volta and Michael Faraday respectively for the practical units based on the centimetre-gramme-second absolute system. This was supported by Thomson (Lord Kelvin). These names were later scaled for use in the Practical System. The concept of naming units of measure after noteworthy scientists was subsequently used for other units.

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    $\begingroup$ Nine points for pasting something off Wikipedia? $\endgroup$
    – fdb
    Mar 30, 2015 at 15:39
  • $\begingroup$ That's a tad negative isn't it? Not only does finding an answer take time, but why should we require good answers have hard work put in? What matters is that questions get answered. $\endgroup$ Jan 28, 2022 at 20:05

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