To convert feet to meters (ft to m), multiply by 0.3048. 1 foot equals 0.3048 m, about 44% of a tennis racket.
| feet | meters |
|---|---|
| 1 foot | 0.3048 m |
| 2 feet | 0.6096 m |
| 5 feet | 1.524 m |
| 10 feet | 3.048 m |
| 25 feet | 7.62 m |
| 50 feet | 15.24 m |
| 100 feet | 30.48 m |
| 250 feet | 76.2 m |
| 500 feet | 152.4 m |
| 1000 feet | 304.8 m |
Definition: 12 inches, or exactly 0.3048 meters.
History: The foot traces back to the Roman "pes," and different versions of it were used across Greek, Roman, English, Chinese, and French systems, each a slightly different length depending on who was measuring. English legend credits King Henry I with standardizing it in the 12th century using his own foot as the template - likely a booted foot, since people (and their footwear) tended to run smaller back then. It took until 1959 for the US, UK, and four other countries to finally agree on one exact, shared definition.
Current use: Building and construction measurements, room dimensions, and aircraft altitude are still commonly given in feet, even in countries that otherwise use metric.
Definition: The base unit of length in the metric system - every other metric length (km, cm, mm) is just meters multiplied or divided by a power of ten.
History: Born out of the French Revolution's push to replace a chaotic patchwork of local, often royally-defined units with something rational and universal. In 1793, French scientists defined the meter as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, measured along the meridian running through Paris - they actually sent surveyors out to physically measure the distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona to calculate it, a project that took years longer than planned. Today the meter is defined by something far more precise and impossible to argue with: the distance light travels in a tiny, fixed fraction of a second.
Current use: The foundation of virtually every length measurement outside the US - room dimensions, building heights, and race distances (measured in km) all build on it.
A foot is defined as exactly 0.3048 metres, fixed by international agreement in 1959. Exact, not measured.
For a quick estimate, multiply by 0.3. That is off by about 1.6%, which is fine for a rough figure and not fine for anything you are paying for or building to. Use the exact factor of 0.304800 when it matters.
Going the other way, one meter is 3.281 ft, which is usually the easier direction to work in. Because the forward factor is small, watch the decimal place rather than the digits: a factor-of-ten slip is the common error, not a rounding one.
To anchor the scale: 5 feet is about 1.52 m.