That time France tried to make decimal time a thing | Engadget

Though Marie Antoinette would be hard-pressed to care, the French Revolution of 1789 set its sights on more than simply toppling the monarchy. Revolutionaries sought to break the nation free from its past, specifically from the clutches of the Catholic church, and point France towards a more glorious and prosperous future. They did so, in part, by radically transforming their measurements of the passage of time.

But if there was little reason to continue using the established chronology system aside from tradition, the revolutionaries figured, why not transmute it into a more rational, scientifically-backed method, just as the revolution itself sought to bring stability and new order to French society as a whole? And what better system to interpose than that of the decimal, which already governed the nation’s weights and measures.

Each week was divided into 10 days, every day was split into 10 equal hours, those were split into 100 minutes, with each minute divided into 100 seconds and each second into 1000 “tierces.” Individual tierces could also be divided into 1000 even tinier units, called “quatierces.

The main advantage of a decimal time system is that, since the base used to divide the time is the same as the one used to represent it, the whole time representation can be handled as a single string.

Paging Swatch...

Some things would much easier if a full circle had 100 degrees and each degree 100 minutes... I curse you, Sumerians and Babylonians!

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