The Bureau was charged with taking control of the seas away from the English and improving accuracy when tracking the longitudes of ships through astronomical observations and reliable clocks.
The ten original members of its founding board were: By a decree of 30 January 1854, the Bureau's mission was extended to embrace geodesy, time standardisation and astronomical measurements.
The French Bureau of Longitude established a commission in the year 1897 to extend the metric system to the measurement of time.
This was a revival of a dream that was in the minds of the creators of the metric system at the time of the French Revolution a hundred years earlier.
Some members of the Bureau of Longitude commission introduced a compromise proposal, retaining the old-fashioned hour as the basic unit of time and dividing it into hundredths and ten-thousandths.