Napoleon tried to do decimal/metric time (10 hours a day, 100 seconds a minute, etc), but it didn’t catch on. Probably because both 24 and 60 are “highly composite numbers”, which means they’re divisible more ways than any numbers smaller than them. 10 isn’t divisible by 3 or 4 or 6, which makes it less useful in certain situations. Also, “megaseconds” and “gigaseconds” are way too big to be useful measures of time on human scales.
That wasn’t Napoleon but the French revolution. They implemented new decimal timekeeping, new decimal calendar and all the jazz - partly because they were fans of metric, partly because they absolutely wanted to get rid of all the old (=feudal and/or religious) things.
Soviets did try this too with 5-days weeks in the 20s but it was so frustrating and unmemorable you can hardly find many sources about it, like it didn’t happened. Yet, one of the similar ideas coming from the same place – a 5-year plan – was kept in action for decades.
Napoleon undid parts of the metric system, including metric time and calendar. Napoleon was an opportunist and played both the revolutionaries and the reactionaries.
The same argument about divisibility could be made about all of the metric system, but metric measurement for length, volume, mass etc all caught on just fine.
Reforming time and calendar systems in general seems to be hard to make work. The USSR tried to implement 5 and 6 day week systems which they later abandoned. Swatch had a go at metric time with .beat but that never went beyond a novelty.
I mean, those are the biggest downsides to metric for all units. 10 is a terrible number, it’s just that uniformity and consistency are better than 10 is bad.
Time is already about as consistent as it’s possible to make it, it just uses 60 instead of 10.
Everyone is already using the same system for the most part, so there’s no real reason to switch.
Units larger than a second also aren’t proper units, because they change length in a semi regular basis, and you can’t change that without making them useless, since they’re based on movement of celestial bodies.
We switched to metric to move away from inconsistency and non standard units, not to move towards the number ten or “old” units.
I read a sci fi book where they used Ksec, Msec, etc. for all the time references - meant as a little background flavor but it was interesting to me just how much trying to parse it while I read just threw off my whole train of thought. Far more so than adjusting to metric spatial or temperature references.
It failed because replacing clocks is a lot more expensive than replacing yardsticks.
Plus, they couldn’t decide on a two day or a three day week weekend. And the annual calendar was a mathematically impossible to him because of internal contradictions.
Napoleon tried to do decimal/metric time (10 hours a day, 100 seconds a minute, etc), but it didn’t catch on. Probably because both 24 and 60 are “highly composite numbers”, which means they’re divisible more ways than any numbers smaller than them. 10 isn’t divisible by 3 or 4 or 6, which makes it less useful in certain situations. Also, “megaseconds” and “gigaseconds” are way too big to be useful measures of time on human scales.
That wasn’t Napoleon but the French revolution. They implemented new decimal timekeeping, new decimal calendar and all the jazz - partly because they were fans of metric, partly because they absolutely wanted to get rid of all the old (=feudal and/or religious) things.
Soviets did try this too with 5-days weeks in the 20s but it was so frustrating and unmemorable you can hardly find many sources about it, like it didn’t happened. Yet, one of the similar ideas coming from the same place – a 5-year plan – was kept in action for decades.
Napoleon undid parts of the metric system, including metric time and calendar. Napoleon was an opportunist and played both the revolutionaries and the reactionaries.
The same argument about divisibility could be made about all of the metric system, but metric measurement for length, volume, mass etc all caught on just fine.
Reforming time and calendar systems in general seems to be hard to make work. The USSR tried to implement 5 and 6 day week systems which they later abandoned. Swatch had a go at metric time with .beat but that never went beyond a novelty.
I mean, those are the biggest downsides to metric for all units. 10 is a terrible number, it’s just that uniformity and consistency are better than 10 is bad.
Time is already about as consistent as it’s possible to make it, it just uses 60 instead of 10.
Everyone is already using the same system for the most part, so there’s no real reason to switch.
Units larger than a second also aren’t proper units, because they change length in a semi regular basis, and you can’t change that without making them useless, since they’re based on movement of celestial bodies.
We switched to metric to move away from inconsistency and non standard units, not to move towards the number ten or “old” units.
No, it’s not the same argument.
Time is defined by a bunch of unrelated astronomic phenomena. You won’t get a homogeneous representation of that.
I read a sci fi book where they used Ksec, Msec, etc. for all the time references - meant as a little background flavor but it was interesting to me just how much trying to parse it while I read just threw off my whole train of thought. Far more so than adjusting to metric spatial or temperature references.
Duodecimal gang represent!!!
One way or another, 1 hour (in a 24 hour clock) is a nice segment of time.
It failed because replacing clocks is a lot more expensive than replacing yardsticks.
Plus, they couldn’t decide on a two day or a three day week weekend. And the annual calendar was a mathematically impossible to him because of internal contradictions.