Pouces to Kilometers (pouce to km)

1 pouce equals 0.00002706994875 kilometers (rounded).

1 pouce = 0.00002706994875 kilometers

How to convert pouces to kilometers

To convert pouces to kilometers, multiply the number of pouces by 0.00002706994875. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply kilometers by 36,941.33333 (rounded).

kilometers = pouces × 0.00002706994875

Example: 10 pouces = 0.0002706994875 kilometers.

About these units

Pouce (pouce)

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

The old French inch, about 2.707 cm; slightly longer than the English inch.

Pouce means thumb in French, the same body-part logic found in many inch-like units. In the royal system it was one twelfth of the pied du roi, which gives about 27.07 millimetres, or roughly 1.066 English inches. Each pouce was in turn divided into twelve lignes.

Craftsmen, surveyors and builders across France quoted lengths in pieds, pouces and lignes until the metric reforms of the 1790s, and the pouce was the natural unit for small dimensions. Because the French inch was slightly longer than the English one, converting between the two traditions always needs the exact ratio and not a rough equivalence.

The pouce shared the history of the foot it came from. Its size depended on the royal standard, which was an iron toise bar kept in Paris, and that bar was replaced after it was found deformed in 1668. Under the metric law of 1799 it was fixed in relation to the metre, and the same ratio is quoted today.

1 pouce = 0.02706994875 meters (approximately).

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

Kilometer (km)

Metric (SI)Current unit

1,000 meters. The standard unit for road distances in most countries.

A name for 1,000 meters took a while to settle. In 1793 France's National Convention made the metre the sole French unit of length, and the first proposed name for the thousand-metre multiple was millaire. Everyday French usage then leaned on the myriametre, 10,000 meters, well into the 1800s. The Netherlands adopted the kilometre in 1817, under the local name mijl, and made it the only official unit of that size in 1867. In 1935 the CIPM dropped the myria- prefix, which left the kilometre as the standard unit for road-scale distances.

Kilo- is the SI prefix for a thousand, and the kilometre is now the preferred unit for land distances in most of the world, with the United States, the United Kingdom and Liberia among those that still use the mile. One kilometre is about 0.621 mile. The main span of Lisbon's 25 de Abril Bridge, at 1.013 km, gives a sense of the scale. Even its pronunciation has been argued over: in 1970 Australia's Metric Conversion Board made stress on the first syllable official, although Prime Minister Gough Whitlam argued for stress on the second. Military slang in several countries calls it a klick.

1 kilometer = 1,000 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kilometre; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; BIPM: history of the metre

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