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iamveryDerp OP t1_j61tkhr wrote

IIRC, he took no payment for the report. It was a passion project.
He did most of the research on his own time, which is one of the reasons it took so long, and he honestly thought it would be his literary legacy, which is why it was so unnecessarily detailed.

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buttergun t1_j63qbja wrote

I'm pretty sure it was just an elaborate prank by the Van Buren Boys to keep JQA occupied with hundreds of frivolous correspondences about what can and can not be measured with the metric system.

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