James Clerk Maxwell and Elihu Thomson ( through the British Association for the Advancement of Science - BAAS ) came up with the Centimetre gram second system of units ( cgs ) in 1874 . James Clerk Maxwell and Elihu Thomson ( through the British Association for the Advancement of Science - BAAS ) introduced the Centimetre gram second system of units ( cgs ) in 1874 , in order to derive electric and magnetic metric units , following the recommendation of Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1832 .