1. Development of legal metrology and units

1.1 History

While for centuries – and even millennia, since there was already an Office of Weights and Measures in the Roman forum – legal metrology was concerned only with weights, measures of length and measures of capacity, its field of application has undergone considerable development over the last fifty years or so, as a result of the increase in economic exchanges, the growing complexity of measurement techniques and a strong tendency, until the mid-1980s, towards regulatory intervention by the State. In fact, the scope of legal metrology is neither fixed in time nor in space.

In France, for example, medical scales are regulated, but not portable blood pressure measuring devices, whereas in Germany, the opposite is true. Even when a category of measuring...