Convert feet to meters

Symbol

The foot is represented by the symbol ‘ft’ or often approximated by an apostrophe. For example, 5 feet is sometimes denoted as 5’.

Description

The Foot is a unit of length in the British imperial and United States customary systems of measurement. In both cases, one foot is equal to 12 inches.

For yard to foot calculations, one yard comprises of three feet. The standard measurement of a foot is exactly 0.3048 meters, which is equivalent to 304.8 millimeters. So for foot to meter conversion, multiply foot by 0.3048. 

Following that, there are 3.281 feet in a meter. While converting ft to cm, note that there are 0.0328 feet in a centimeter. So, one foot is equal to 30.48 centimeters. 

The measurement of a United States survey foot is exactly 1200 ⁄3937 meters or approximately 0.30480061 m. It is used for mapping and surveying. It is exactly 1,000,000/999,998 times the international foot which means that it is larger by 610 nm or nanometer.

History

The Old English word "fot" is where the word "foot" (meaning "terminal part of the leg of a vertebrate animal") came from.

Historically, the "foot" was a part of many regional systems of units, such as the Greek, Roman, Chinese, French, and English systems. The first recorded standard foot measure comes from Sumer, where a definition is given in a statue of Gudea of Lagash from around 2575 BC. 

Use

Feet is generally used for measuring height such as floor height, human height, short distances, elevation etc.

Symbol

The meter is represented by the symbol ‘m’.

Description

Meter is the base unit of length in the SI system (International System of Units). The term meter was originally derived from the Greek words "metreo" (verb form) and "metron" (noun form) meaning "measure”.

The length of the path that light takes in the vacuum in 1/299792458 seconds was the official definition of a meter from 1983 to 2019. As of 2019, the meter has been redefined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second where a caesium hyperfine transition frequency defines the second.

Hence, the difference between the old and new definitions of meter is the addition of the definition of the second. However, interestingly the definition of the meter fixes the speed of light in a vacuum to the exact value of 299,792,458 m/s. 

Meters can be changed to other SI units using prefix multipliers based on powers of ten. For example, a meter consists of 100 centimeters, and one thousand meters equals a kilometer.

To convert m to in (meter to inches), you will need to multiplu the meter by 39.37 since  a meter equals 39.37 inches. Let's talk about large unites and how meter looks in comparison to them. 1609 meters is equivalent to a statute mile. 

History

The French first used the unit meter in the late 1700s. On March 30, 1791, the French Academy of Sciences specified the length of a meter. 

However, it was officially defined in 1799. In 1983, the meter was defined as it is measured now. But in 2019, the addition of the definition of second was added to it to reducec uncertainity.

The English word 'metre' was first used at the beginning of 1797. It was first measured with an interferometer by Albert A. Michelson in 1893.

Use

Meter is used for length, height, width and thickness measurement of objects in countries that follow SI units. However, in the states it is not used commonly.