The "Plan for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the United States" was a report submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives on July 13, 1790, by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. At the First United States Congress, which met in 1789 when the decimal metric system had not yet been developed in France, the system of units to be used in the U.S. was one point of discussion. Under the Constitution (article I, section 8), the Congress has the constitutional right to decide on a standard of weights and measures. On January 8, 1790, George Washington urged Congress to address the need for the uniform system of weights and measures, and on January 15, 1790, the House of Representatives requested Thomas Jefferson to draw up a plan. The decimal dollar had already been agreed upon in principle in 1785, but would not be implemented until after the enactment of the Coinage Act of 1792. After correspondence with William Waring and others, Jefferson proposed two systems of units in mid-1790. The first was evolutionary, and was based on refinement of the definitions of the units of the existing English system, as well as simplification of their relationship to each other. The second system was revolutionary, and was based on units linked by powers of ten, very similar to the decimal metric system which would be proposed in France. The base units for length, mass, and volume in Jefferson's revolutionary system (named the foot, the ounce, and the bushel, respectively) were relatively close in size to their pre-existing counterparts and bore identical names, although the manner in which they were defined was very different. Jefferson's proposal was the world's first scientifically based, fully integrated, decimal system of weights and measures. The seconds pendulum basis In coordination with scientists in France, Jefferson selected the seconds pendulum at 45° latitude as the basic reference. For technical reasons, he proposed using a uniform rod as the pendulum rather than a traditional pendulum. The pendulum was estimated to be 39.14912 English inches long (which at that time was not yet defined to be exactly 25.4 mm, of course), or 1.5 times that for a vibrating rod (58.72368 inches). More traditional proposal In the evolutionary approach, the foot was to be derived from these lengths by a simple integer factor, which would be either three (pendulum) or five (rod), i.e. lengthening it from