So, everyone knows about the metric system for weights and measures that was introduced in France during the Revolution (I mean the one in the 1790s, not the Vendée Uprising, the July Revolution, the 100 Days, the Fronde, the February Revolution, the 1851 Coup d’État, the Bourbon Restoration or the other Bourbon Restoration).
And many people have at least heard of the French Republican Calendar from the same era. Coup of 18 Brumaire, anyone?
But did you know there was also a push to reinvent how to measure time itself? To ditch the 12-hour clock and 24-hour day and replace them with a decimal-based system of metric time?
Under this system, the day was divided into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. That meant new time units like the centijour, or one one-hundredth of a day, equivalent to exactly 14 minutes and 24 seconds of old-fashioned time.
As you might expect, things got messy fast, not least because nobody could agree when it came to defining what a “second” actually was. That question was so thorny it wasn’t fully settled until the 1960s, when we landed on the modern definition based on the radioactive decay of a cesium-133 atom.
In theory, the system could have worked. Our 24-hour clock is just as arbitrary, after all, but people weren’t ready to set their clock-radio alarms* to 3.2 or to schedule their afternoon coffee break at 6.7. The metric clock, like the calendar that came with it, was ultimately swept into the dustbin of history.
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* Yeah, I know, 1790s… it’s a joke, people. Lighten up.
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