Most people are generally aware of volts, a measure of electricity named after Alessandro Volta. Another electrical measure is the ohm. That was named after Georg Ohm. And amps, or amperes, are named after André-Marie Ampere. Perhaps you see a pattern here. Measures and standards established in the past two or three centuries are often named after their inventors or discoverers. There are also teslas, decibels (Alexander Graham Bell), coulombs, and hertz. And there are plenty more! Some of the more obscure measures include the henry (Joseph Henry), the rayl (Lord Rayleigh; it’s a measure of acoustic impedence, whatever that is), the weber (Wilhelm Weber’s measure of magnetic flux), and the eotvos, a measurement of gravitational gradient that was the brainchild of Lorand Eotvos. Even more obscure is the jansky, named for Karl Guthe Jansky, and it’s a unit of spectral flux density (something radio astronomers deal with, evidently).
This tradition has been around long enough that there are even measures that aren’t used any more, such as the franklin (Ben Franklin) and the faraday (Michael Faraday), both measures of electric charge, the clausius, a measure of entropy named for Rudolf Clausius, and the einstein, which had something to do with photochemistry.
One of the least useful (but really the best) measurements named after people is the altuve, which is a distance of 5 feet, 5 inches (1.65 meters). It’s named after Jose Altuve, a very short baseball player for the Houston Astros. Another one is the smoot, which is 5 feet 7 inches, and named for Oliver Smoot.
The story of the smoot is that in 1958, Oliver Smoot was a pledge in the Lamda Chi Alpha fraternity at MIT, and the Harvard Bridge was measured to be 364.4 smoots long (plus or minus one ear) . The standard used to measure the bridge was, of course, Smoot himself — he lay down on the bridge, his position was marked, he moved up one, er, smoot, and lay down again, etc.. The Cambridge police actually adopted the smoot when they reported accidents or other events on the bridge, and during a later rebuild, the bridge sidewalk was rebuilt in sections exactly one smoot long.
Smoot himself, by the way, was apparently permanently affected by his 1958 experience. He went on to become the chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Both organizations define standards of measurement — although neither one has yet endorsed the smoot.
By the way, here’s a unit that isn’t named after a person, but it’s a good one anyway. Anybody who remembers the Vax/VMS operating system (the model for Windows NT, which is nearly as forgotten), it included a parameter “timepromptwait” that was specified in microfortnights — that is, one millionth of a fortnight, or about 1.2 seconds. That unit was adopted by the ISO; it’s specified in ISO 9542.
