CHAPTER ONE THE SEAMSTRESS The mollusk when born is naked and incomplete it becomes progressively developed in the end of the spire of the parent argonaut and after a given time it goes on forming its shell -JEANNE VILLEPREUX POWER 1839 The girl who would grow up to reinvent marine biology never saw the sea as a child She was raised in Juillac France about 200 kilometers 124 miles from the closest ocean and more than 400 kilometers 250 miles south of Paris Today a car could make those trips in a matter of hours but in 1794 when Jeanne was born horses were the fastest method of transportation Riding to the sea or to the capital would have taken days Juillac was a remote country town and a good thing too for Jeanne's family 10
WELCOME TO REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE In the 1790s the French Revolution was in full swing with Paris as its violent epicenter The inspiring ideals of Liberty Equality Brotherhood were offset by mass beheadings drownings widespread vandalism and theft What began as an uprising of commoners against the monarchy and clergy turned into a dictatorship of the so called French First Republic A broad interpretation of equality led to dangerous laws such as one that let any person claim to be a doctor and treat patients The guillotine was invented to execute traitors efficiently and the new government interpreted traitor even more broadly than equality But that was all distant news in Juillac where townsfolk busy with their daily lives probably cared less about political executions in Paris than about local marriages births and deaths The year that the guillotine fell on King Louis XVI 1793 also saw the wedding of Jeanne's parents Pierre Villepreux a Juillac police officer and Jeanne Nicot from Limoges a town just a couple of days walk to the north The young couple was well educated both having learned to read and write at a time when most French women and about half of French men were illiterate The community of Juillac nestles in the hills of central France Its population was recorded as 2,126 in 1793 the year that Jeanne's parents were married THE SEAMSTRESS 11
They were also reasonably well off with a dowry money paid to the groom by the parents of the bride from the Nicot family Here's the domestic news for the next year 1794 Madame Jeanne Villepreux was pregnant Here's the national news the Revolution had become the Reign of Terror The radical Maximilien Robespierre and his fellows were executing anyone sympathetic to the monarchy anyone sympathetic to the Catholic Church and anyone who didn't fall into either category but happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time The revolutionaries also abolished slavery in all French colonies It had been abolished in France itself 479 years earlier by King Louis X with the idealistic declaration France signifies freedom By contrast colonial abolition was primarily motivated by revolts of the enslaved populations The Terror ended in July when Robespierre was guillotined and in September the Villepreux parents welcomed their first child a daughter Although we now record her birthday as September 25 1794 at the time her family was required to call it the 4th of Vendémiaire Year 3 of the Republican calendar The revolutionaries had cleverly devised this new timekeeping method to avoid all references to royalty or religion It followed an efficient logical decimal system including ten day weeks and ten hour days In fact the Republic's lofty ambition was to reinvent everything with efficiency and logic While some efforts flopped the new calendar was abandoned after twelve years the metric system became an international standard for measurement The reverence for rationality that characterized revolutionary France contributed to a broader European shift toward systematic logic Jeanne would later bring this approach to her scientific pursuits helping to ground the field of marine biology in experiment and evidence rather than armchair theorizing When Jeanne was born France was reeling from the bloody aftermath of King Louis XVI's execution in 1793. This period fascinate in history continued to people long after it took place this wood engraving was published in 1900 THE LADY AND THE OCTOPUS 12
BIRTH OF THE METRIC SYSTEM If you grew up in the United States you're probably used to measuring temperature in Fahrenheit distance in miles height in feet and weight in pounds a set of measurements known as the US customary system If you grew up almost anywhere else in the world then you use Celsius kilometers meters and kilograms These measurements belong to the metric system which owes its existence to the French Revolution US customary units and the closely related British imperial units are both derived from English units that had been around for hundreds of years This older system has several flaws You have to memorize a large set of arbitrary numbers in order to understand it 12 inches make a foot 16 ounces a pound 5,280 feet a mile Water freezes at 32 F and boils at 212 F What's more for most of history there was no universal standard for these units so what you really meant by a foot or a pound depended on where you lived and who you had to agree with A decimal system which uses multiples of ten to convert between units is a welcome simplification So 100 centimeters make a meter 1,000 meters a kilometer and 1,000 grams a kilogram Water freezes at 0 C and boils at 100 C This astonishingly organized system was born in the chaos of the French Revolution when an international group of scientists convened in Paris and created precise standards for each unit The French Republic officially adopted this new metric system on April 7 1795 though as you may have guessed they would have given it a different name specifically 18 Germinal Year 2 The six month old Jeanne undoubtedly did not care whether she drank milk in ounces or milliliters nor whether she crawled across the floor in feet or meters To be historically precise while prerevolutionary France did use pieds or feet that country's equivalent of the English fluid ounce was the roquille Nevertheless the adoption of the metric system in her home country was an auspicious start for the baby scientist Now researchers all around the world could record and compare results in a consistent reliable way Even American scientists have embraced the metric system in their work although they may still glance out the window and think automatically in Fahrenheit Looks like it might hit 80 today Not just American scientists but also government employees and many industry workers throughout the country regularly use metric measurements So why does the United States still seem to be so stuck on imperial units Well it's a big country with a lot of road signs in miles a lot of thermometers in Fahrenheit and a lot of people who know their own height only in feet and inches Metrication is happening it's just extremely slow In 1975 the Metric Conversion Act declared metric the preferred system but it wasn't until 1991 that the executive branch of the government switched over Today food labels are required to provide metric measurements over the counter drugs and prescription medications have metric dosage and the game of Ultimate Frisbee uses discs made to metric standards Here's a thoughtful prediction from math professor Russ Rowlett The American economy of the 22nd century may be completely metric but probably Americans will still call 30 centimeters a foot and 1,600 meters a mile
