No other base units have a prefix, so why does mass?
In: 188
Other peoples gave the initial reason (the measure used to be the grave, then the gram, then the kilogram), but you could wonder “why didn’t we changed again?”.
The kilogram is one of those many “small flaws” of the metric system, that could be corrected but would be too costly (having to recalibrate everything) for a minimal gain.
Another one of those flaw is the definition of the meter. Initially defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the North pole and the equator, you might be annoyed to learn that this distance is actually equal to 10,001,965m. Similarly, many physicist are frustrated that the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s, so almost 300,000,000 m/s, and had we defined the meter slightly differently (something like “new meter is 0.9993 old meters”) we could have had a nice round value for the speed of light.
And did you know that the temperature for boiling water is not actually 100°C, but is actually 99.975°C? Though admittedly that last one was deliberate. It was to ensure that the absolute zero was at exactly -275.15°C and not some uglier number.
Out of all of the flaws of the SI, renaming the kilogram would probably be the easiest to fix, but it’s still a lot of bother for a minimal gain.
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