1877 by French army engineer Colonel Charles Renard[2][3][4] and reportedly published in an 1886 instruction for captive balloon troops, thus receiving the current name in 1920s.
But one would need to use an appropriate number base to avoid ending up with two incompatible sets of nicely spaced dimensions, if for instance they were applied with both inches and feet.
Similarly, a base of two, eight, or sixteen would fit nicely with the binary units commonly found in computer science.
Each of the Renard sequences can be reduced to a subset by taking every nth value in a series, which is designated by adding the number n after a slash.
The usual cons however is that the thousand product of such multiplication is shifted slightly: Instead of decadic 1000, the binary 1024 appears, as classics in IT.
The pro is that the characteristics is now fully valid, that whatever value multiplied by 2 is also member of the series, any rounding effectively eliminated.