divide into parts than if true milliradians were used. History The milliradian (approximately 6,283.185 in a circle) was first used in the mid-19th century by Charles-Marc Dapples (1837–1920), a Swiss engineer and professor at the University of Lausanne. Degrees and minutes were the usual units of angular measurement but others were being proposed, with "grads" (400 gradians in a circle) under various names having considerable popularity in much of northern Europe. However, Imperial Russia used a different approach, dividing a circle into equilateral triangles (60° per triangle, 6 triangles in a circle) and hence 600 units to a circle. Around the time of the start of World War I, France was experimenting with the use of millièmes or angular mils (6400 in a circle) for use with artillery sights instead of decigrades (4000 in a circle). The United Kingdom was also trialing them to replace degrees and minutes. They were adopted by France although decigrades also remained in use throughout World War I. Other nations also used decigrades. The United States, which copied many French artillery practices, adopted angular mils, later known as NATO mils. Before 2007 the Swedish defence forces used "streck" (6300 in a circle, streck meaning lines or marks) (together with degrees for some navigation) which is closer to the milliradian but then changed to NATO mils. After the Bolshevik Revolution and the adoption of the metric system of measurement (e.g. artillery replaced "units of base" with meters) the Red Army expanded the 600 unit circle into a 6000 mil circle. Hence the Russian mil has a somewhat different origin than those derived from French artillery practices. In the 1950s, NATO adopted metric units of measurement for land and general use. NATO mils, meters, and kilograms became standard, although degrees remained in use for naval and air purposes, reflecting civil practices. Mathematical principle Use of the milliradian is practical because it is concerned with small angles, and when using radians the small angle approximation shows that the angle approximates to the sine of the angle, that is . This allows a user to dispense with trigonometry and use simple ratios to determine size and distance with high accuracy for rifle and short distance artillery calculations by using the handy property of subtension: One mrad approximately subtends one meter at a distance of one thousand meters. More in detail, because , instead of finding the angular distance denoted