In the USA "meter" is used for all of the above. In the UK and other Commonwealth countries, "metre" is the unit of length and the poetical and musical concepts, and "meter" is used for measuring devices. See also the page about American and British English differences.
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The metre is defined as equal to the length of the path travelled by light in absolute vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.
A corresponding unit of area is the square metre and a corresponding unit of volume is the cubic metre.
In 1893, the standard metre was first measured with an interferometer by Albert A. Michelson, the inventor of the device and an advocate of using some particular wavelength of light as a standard of distance.
micrometre (formerly micron) = 1 millionth of a metre
The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French Academy of Sciences[?] as 1/10,000,000 of the distance along the Earth's surface from the North Pole to the Equator along the meridian of Paris and on April 7, 1795 France adopted the metre as its official unit of length.
In 1983 the General Conference on Weights and Measures defined the metre as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second (that is, the speed of light in a vacuum was defined to be 299,792,458 metres per second).
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