I think that’s actually the second go-round (but I’m working from memory) after he had the media worked out satisfactorily, by using mercury. He was trying to get rid of negative numbers in everyday usages, for several very good reasons. I believe the next step was to designate 180 intervals between boiling and freezing, because that would provide 18 whole number divisors. He got this idea from classical geometry - 360 degrees in a circle - and supposedly called his divisions “degrees” for that reason.
Wikipedia has a table of divisors. If you compare numbers like 10 and 100 to numbers like 12 and 180, you can see why mathematicians and carpenters might prefer the latter to the former. Not only does 12 have many whole divisors, those divisors themselves also have abundant divisors. Spiffy, huh?
So why do people fetish over metric systems? Simple. You’ve got ten fingers. Our standard system of writing numbers is an anthropomorphic base ten system, and there’s value in leveraging that notation for many (but not all) things. Caveman notation because we’re still cave people in our heads.
