In the aftermath of the French Revolution, decimal time joined the other decimal weights and measures to form a new metric system. Unlike the others, though, decimal time was soon discarded in favor of the very decidedly non-metric 24 hour, 60 minute, 60 second clock that was standard at the time and is still used universally today. Is it time to let metric time shine once more?
Note: I wasn’t aware, when I wrote this article, of the Swatch .beat watches that used “Internet Time”, which is actually metric time. So this idea keeps coming back!
What is Metric Time?
There were several proposals for metric time, back in the day. Jean-Charles de Borda proposed to simply divide a day into ten hours, each hour into 100 minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. This is the system I implemented in my metric clock widget.
Joseph Louis-Lagrange proposed splitting a day into 10 decidays or 100 centidays, and these would be written together. For instance, 8:50 in metric time would be written 8/5 for 8 decidays and 5 centidays. There would be 100,000 decimal seconds in a day.
Jean-Marie Viallon, of the Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris, thought that the metric hour (worth 2.4 standard hours), was too long, and proposed splitting the day into two halves, with the first ten hours running from midnight to noon, and the second ten hours taking up the balance of the day. There would be 50 decimal minutes per decimal hour, and 100 decimal seconds per decimal minute.
Now wait just a doggone hemi-medi-deci-second here…
What happened?
The same thing that happened when Canada and the USA were going to go metric in the 1970s, but the US got cold feet. When I was a kid, we were hyped to be going metric. Stuff was going to be so simple. Jimmy Carter was going to be connecting us to the world. In school, we started learning the metric system. I lived in New Hampshire, so road signs were changed to have both miles and kilometers (as well as both French and English for some. We do like our Quebec neighbors in New Hamster.) There were contests for school kids to test their metric knowledge.
Then Reagan got elected and was all like, “nah, dude”. No going metric. He also ripped the solar panels off the roof of the White House. Not gonna be any clean green future for HIS USA, no sirree.
Anyway. There was panic. Lots of news broadcasts showing frightened boomers panicking about having to buy 1.8723456 kilos of hamburger or trying to figure out how to fit 137 milliliters of coffee in their standard size coffee cups.
(But really, it is super easy. 1 liter is about equal to a quart, 250 ml is about equal to a cup, this isn’t hard, we learned it in school.)
There was similar panic back in Revolutionary-era France. Watchmakers would have to throw away their inventory! Rural people would refuse to change! Nobody wants to say “centiday” when the word minute is right there! There would be another revolution! And so, the proposal was dropped, and the metric system was put in place without dealing with the clock or the calendar.
The metric system was applied to angles, though — but I don’t know anyone who uses gradians (100 gradians in a right angle). So, all you native metric people… how metric are you, really?
What about time zones?
This is the real issue.
And, it was solved hundreds of years ago.
The Earth is split, by convention, into 24 time zones, one for each hour of the day. In a decimal time system, it would be split into 10 time zones instead. This would mean that all of North America would fit into one time zone, same for all of Europe. Noon on the east side of a decimal time zone would still be breakfast time on the west side.
Keeping the standard 24 time zones would make it difficult to coordinate things, as no two time zones would have their clocks in sync. Right now, I’m GMT-5. If it is 00:00 GMT, it is 19:00 EST. If the clock ticks over a minute, it is 00:01 GMT, and 19:01 EST. The minutes are in sync.
Under metric time, but using the 24 hour time zones, the North American east coast would hit local midnight at 02:08 metric time in Greenwich. It isn’t clean.
No, we do away with time zones entirely. 00:00 metric time in Greenwich, UK, is 00:00 metric time in New York, is 00:00 metric time in Tokyo, and the international date line runs through 0 degrees longitude.
This means that the day would change in the early evening here in eastern NA, before the end of the work day in California, sometime in the morning in Chennai. This would be weird.
It’s already weird. We live globally now and this is going to continue. India provides IT contractors to the world. People in Mumbai have to deal with time being different in London or New York or Dusseldorf or wherever their jobs take them. They are dealing with the day of the week being more of a suggestion or a hindrance than something that is stable, all the time. People working anywhere in the world that work with people in another part of the world, even between east and west coasts in the USA, are already dealing with it.
It’s an idea for a globally connected world.
Its time has come.
The widget on my blog shows the Adjusted Metric Time. It uses your local midnight as 00:00:00. Seconds are a little faster. Minutes and hours a lot slower. More time to relax and enjoy life.
Enjoy your new 17 1/2 hour work week and raise a glass to those old revolutionaries who dared think about time in a new way.
I have an actual 17.5 hour work week. Well, 17 to be exact. I work two days and that’s my week. Over here, we ended up with a hybrid metric/imperial system that even post-Brexit no-one seems that bothered about pushing either way. We buy beer in pints but milk in liters. We measure roads in miles but cloth in meters. It’s like being bilingual. I kinda like it.
I do believe that’s where we’re headed. We have liter and two liter sodas, drugs are bought in grams (not that I use them — I don’t), we run races measured in kilometers. It’s weird.