Left: Jeannie with her parents George and Elspeth. Right: Jeannie's first day of school with her teacher Sally Barrett. Photo: Supplied
It's 150 years today since the Metre Convention was signed - a pretty radical initiative at the time that had a massive global impact.
Up until then, the world's measurements were pretty ad hoc, and as trade increased around the world there was an urgent need for some kind of standardisation. The Convention - also known as the Treaty of the Metre - ushered in the metric system. New Zealand started the transition to metric in 1969 and was fully metric by December 1976. Almost every country in the world, except the US, Myanmar and Liberia, uses the metric system.
Jeannie Preddey knows perhaps better than most about what it meant to go metric. She's thought to be the first baby in New Zealand whose weight was announced in kilograms, rather than pounds. She became a mascot of sorts - dubbed "Little Miss Metric" and every birthday until she was ten (of course) she was given a "metric birthday party" by the New Zealand Metric Advisory Board.
