D. I. Mendeleev Institute for Metrology

[1] State regulation of weights and measures in Russia was patchy and piecemeal until 29 April 1797, when Tsar Paul I issued a standardization edict aimed primarily at reducing fraud.

Institutions for implementing this law followed, with a division overseeing standardisation being added to St Petersburg's Department of City Management, for example, on 19 September 1798.

On 4 June 1842, an ancillary protocol to the 1835 act required that copies of the standards set in 1835 be distributed throughout the empire, and to achieve this, the Depot of Exemplary Measures and Weights was founded in Saint Petersburg and placed under the control of the Learned Storekeeper – the first person to hold this role was Adolph Kupfer.

This standardisation correlated with the introduction of major railway building, and legal reform, making it part of a wider imperial, ideological programme.

The main goals of the new institution were to unify the many different weights and measures used in the diverse Russian Empire, achieve their regulation in trade and industry, and orchestrate the eventual conversion to the metric system.

[6] The introduction of the metric system into Russia for optional use in 1899 and then completely in 1918, is intimately bound with the work of D. I. Mendeleev as director of the Bureau.