DECIMAL TIME CLOCK FREE

So, 12 months of 30 days apiece resulted in 5 days (6 in a leap year!) left over.

That there are 365 days in a year is an immutable fact dictated by the movement of the Earth around our local star. This division would result in much easier and more convenient calculations and would be very preferable to the arbitrary division of the livre into twenty sous, of the sou into twelve deniers, of the day into twenty-four hours, the hour into sixty minutes, etc.”īy subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy.īy the eve of the Revolution, the idea had evolved into a year split into 12 months of 30 days apiece, their names inspired by crops and the prevailing weather in Paris during their occurrences. The concept of decimal time, wherein a day is broken down into multiples of 10, was first suggested more than thirty years prior when French mathematician, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, argued in 1754, “It would be very desirable that all divisions, for example of the livre, the sou, the toise, the day, the hour, etc. So, while it wasn’t busy abolishing the privileges of the First and Second Estate, eliminating the church’s power to levy taxes or just drowning nonjuring Catholic priests en masse, France’s neophyte post-revolution government set about reforming the realm’s calendars and clocks. As such, the nation had traditionally adhered to the 12-month Gregorian calendar - itself based on even older, sexagesimal (6-unit) divisible systems adapted from the Babylonians and Egyptians - while French clocks cycled every 60 minutes and seconds.īut 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.

Throughout the 18th century, most French folks were Catholic as that was the only religion allowed to be openly practiced in the country, and had been since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. They did so, in part, by radically transforming their measurements of the passage of time.

DECIMAL TIME CLOCK FREE

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. Though Marie Antoinette would be hard-pressed to care, the French Revolution of 1789 set its sights on more than simply toppling the monarchy.

Decimal time clock