States, President James Madison appointed him the first superintendent of the United States Coast Survey in 1816. The creative side of Hassler was seen in the design of new surveying instruments. Most original was Hassler's baseline apparatus which involved an idea worked out by him in Switzerland and perfected in America. Instead of bringing different bars in actual contact during the process of baseline measurements, he used four two-metre iron bars fastened together totaling eight metres in length and optical contact. As early as February–March 1817, Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, standardized the bars of his device which were actually calibrated on the Committee Metre (an authentic copy of the Mètre des Archives) which was the property of the American Philosophical Society, to whom it had been presented by Hassler himself, who had received it from Tralles, a foreign member of the French Committee charged with the construction of the standard metre by comparison with the Toise of Peru, which had served as unit of length in the measurement of the meridional arcs in France and Peru. The Committee Metre possessed all the authenticity of any original metre extant, bearing not only the stamp of the committee, but also the original mark by which it was distinguished from the other bars during the operation of standardising. Thus the metre became the unit of length for geodesy in the United States. Indeed, the Committee Metre served as the standard of length for Coast and Geodetic Survey until 1890, when the National Prototype Metre Bar No. 27 allotted to the United States in 1889 at the first General Conference on Weights and Measures arrived in Washington. However, Hassler had exceeded the spending limitations that had been set for his trip to Europe, and the resulting controversy foreshadowed the frictions between Hassler and the American Government that would plague his career. In 1818, the United States Congress removed supervision of the U.S. Coast Survey from Hassler and gave control to the army, where it lingered until 1832. On July 10, 1832, Congress reestablished the Coast Survey on the basis of the original act of 1807. Upon President Jackson's recommendation, Hassler again became its Superintendent and was able to continue his superintendence over the work in Weights and Measures. Superintendent of weights and measures Hassler became the head of the Office of Standard Weights and Measures (this office was a progenitor of the United States Bureau