Pieds Du Roi to Centimeters (pied to cm)

1 pied du roi equals 32.4839385 centimeters (rounded).

1 pied du roi = 32.4839385 centimeters

How to convert pieds du roi to centimeters

To convert pieds du roi to centimeters, multiply the number of pieds du roi by 32.4839385. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply centimeters by 0.03078444444 (rounded).

centimeters = pieds du roi × 32.4839385

Example: 10 pieds du roi = 324.839385 centimeters.

About these units

Pied Du Roi (pied)

French (Ancien Régime)Historical unit (no longer in standard use)

The 'king's foot' of the French Ancien Régime, about 32.48 cm; 12 pouces. About 6.6% longer than the English foot.

King's foot is the literal meaning of the name, and the unit was reputed to descend, with little change, from the measures of Charlemagne, which in turn drew on Byzantine and Roman practice. For about a thousand years it stayed close to the same length, though the surviving standards disagree slightly: the foot of the old toise de l'Écritoire is given as 326.6 millimetres, against about 324.8 for the later royal foot.

The figure now used for the pied du roi is 4500/13853 metre, about 32.48 centimetres or 1.066 English feet. This ratio comes from the 1799 law that defined the metre in terms of the Toise of Peru. It was divided into 12 pouces and 144 lignes, while six pieds made one toise.

Wikipedia notes that its own sources vary on details of the standards. The iron toise at the Grand Châtelet was bent before 1668 and replaced by a bar roughly 0.5 percent shorter, which shows how much a nominally fixed unit could drift. Quebec's pied, still seen in land records, is about four parts per million smaller than the French original.

1 pied du roi = 0.324839385 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Pied du roi; Wikipedia: Toise; Wikipedia: Traditional French units of measurement

Centimeter (cm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One hundredth of a meter. Used for body measurements, clothing and everyday objects.

Scientists, rather than shopkeepers, gave the centimeter its place. In 1832 Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed a system of absolute units built on length, mass and time, choosing the millimeter, milligram and second. In 1873 a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose members included James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), recommended the centimeter, gram and second instead. That CGS system dominated physics for decades, until the metre-kilogram-second system replaced it in the mid-twentieth century and led to SI.

CGS units proved awkward for rooms and buildings, which run to hundreds of centimeters, but the centimeter itself never went away. It is still the everyday unit for height, clothing and small objects, and it appears in map scales and rainfall reports. An adult fingernail is roughly one centimeter wide, and a milliliter is defined as exactly one cubic centimeter. An inch is exactly 2.54 centimeters. The CGS system itself survives mainly in theoretical physics and astrophysics, where Gaussian units are still common.

1 centimeter = 0.01 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; Wikipedia: Centimetre; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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