As part of the spirited revolutionary attitudes to all aspects of French life, the metric system was adopted as the official and sole system of measurement in France by act of assembly on 10 December 1799. The chosen "meter" was 1/10,000,000 of the quadrant of the Earth from the North POle to the Equator, along the meridian of Paris. Étienne Lenoir (1744-1825) constructed the platimun standard metre, whilst Nicolas Fortin produced the standard kilogram in platinum. The lead-up to this act was ten years of hard work by the French scientists and mathematicians. Lenoir had constructed the original equipment used by the Commission of Weights and Measures (who included the father of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), whose tenure was cut short by his visit to the guillotine) to determine the metric values, and by 1794, he had made a provisional metre in brass, and invented a machine for its accurate reproduction. 660 accurate copies were made for distrubution throughout France and in 1794 the Commission published a handbook explaining the metric system and supplying conversion tables; their work was considered complete in 1798 when they completed their own full conversion. The metre was found to measure 3 feet 11.296 lines, slightly shorter than their aim of 3 feet 11.44 lines. Iron copies of the standard measures were dispatched to foreign countries, but general acceptance was slow in coming. At the beginning of the Commission's work, in 1791, the secretary of the Royal Society, Charles Blagden, told president Sir Joseph Banks that he felt the French wished "to divert the attention of the European public from the true amount of their proposal, which in fact is that their measurement of 9 or 10 degrees of a meridian in France shall be adopted as the universal standard". And even in France, it took some time before it fulfilled the decrees of the 1799 Act; 1812 saw the Napoleonic government introduce the "common foot" and the "common pound" and the metric system did not become truly compulsory in France until 1840.