(The same could not be said of the metric system of weights and measurements, which helped to standardize commerce weights and measurements often differed in neighboring countries, but clocks generally did not.) Furthermore, replacing every clock and watch in the country was a spendy proposition. People were unfamiliar with switching systems of time, and there were few practical reasons for non-mathematicians to change how they told time.
30 november 1986 french revolutionary calendar license#
Here's one - see if you can figure out when primetime TV starts:ĭecimal clock photo by "Cormullion," used under Creative Commons license via Wikimedia These clock faces were spectacularly weird. The French manufactured clocks and watches showing both decimal time and standard time on their faces (allowing for conversion and confusion). Noon is Now at 5įrench Revolutionary Time officially began on Novemalthough conceptual work around the system had been going on since the 1750s. The trick was that every living person already had a well-established way to tell time, and old habits die hard. This thoroughly modern system had a few practical benefits, chief among them being a simplified way to do time-related math: if we want to know when a day is 70% complete, decimal time simply says "at the end of the seventh hour," whereas standard time requires us to say "at 16 hours, 48 minutes." French Revolutionary Time was a more elegant solution to that math problem. Everybody knows that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in minute.* But in 1793, the French smashed the old clock in favor of French Revolutionary Time: a 10-hour day, with 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute.
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