Yes, developping vernier scales and digital calipers were much smarter ideas than simply making the markings thinner. I guess an issue with those is they're only available up to a 15-cm length. I think longer one do exist but they're very expensive.
In case anyone else was wondering, I looked up this morning why Cesium (among other atoms) was chosen to define the second, and it's because it has a lone electron in its outer shell. Because that lone electron is minimally affected by all the other electrons of a Cesium atom, its transition from spin up to spin down (were it in a magnetic field) emits a photon with minimal uncertainty. Minimal uncertainty - that's what we want from a time standard. Out of all atomic transitions, that lone atomic electron transitionning from spin up to spin down, is the one emitting a photon with a wavelength (or period, or frequency) having minimal uncertainty.
Here's that lone electron in the outer shell on top of his game. The Michael Jordan of time keeping.
View attachment 519650
So my point is that this little guy is what all other time units are based on, and when you add the speed of light constant (speed of an electro-magnetic wave in vacuum, to be precise) to the soup, you get definitions for all length measurements (which is what this thread is about).
I have both "brought more material than the curriculum", and criticized teachers for bringing too much more material (curiously, I explained how anthropogenic climate change can be demonstrated with radioactivity, and I criticized a professor for being too "green"
).