[3] In July 1762 he inherited his family estates;[3] they were worth little,[4] but his wife brought substantial wealth to the marriage, enabling him to build a prestigious house at Batheaston, Somerset.
[3] He made a careful study of the contemporary state of weights and measures before proposing reform in the British House of Commons on 5 February 1790.
[3] In France, Charles Maurice Talleyrand was pursuing similar goals with a unit of length based on the seconds pendulum, as was Thomas Jefferson in the US having been charged by President George Washington with measurement reform.
Talleyrand had ambitions that France would establish itself at the centre of a new international measurement system that would form the basis of global trade and, on hearing of Riggs-Miller's initiative, proposed a tripartite collaboration.
[3] Ultimately, in 1791, the French National Assembly vetoed the pendulum in favour of the meridional definition of the metre, bringing an effective end to hopes of collaboration.