Prior to the 1870 conference, French politicians had feared that the world community might reject the existing metre as it was 0.03% (300 µm) shorter than its design length, ordering a new meridional measurement. They were eventually reassured when the German-born Swiss delegate Adolphe Hirsch said "no serious scientist would in our day and age contemplate a metre deduced from the size of the earth". When the conference was reconvened in 1875, it was proposed that new prototype metre and kilogram standards be manufactured to reproduce the values of the existing artifacts as closely as possible.