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Another fun fact dating from French revolution is the 10 hour-day, each hour had 100 minutes and each minutes 100 seconds : https://historyfacts.com/world-histo
by az09mugen 1y ago
Another fun fact dating from French revolution is the 10 hour-day, each hour had 100 minutes and each minutes 100 seconds : https://historyfacts.com/world-history/fact/france-had-a-calendar-with-10-hour-days-during-the-revolution/ https://historyfacts.com/world-history/fact/france-had-a-cal...
- paulorlando 1y agoFun fact... or not so fun? For 12 years of the revolutionary era, France did use decimal time. And the calendar and clocks were organized around a 10 day week and a 10 hour day. But those changes, coupled with the loss of Sunday worship, had other effects on the population. Here’s an assessment of what was really meant and then lost by the elimination of Sunday: “‘The elderly ladies took advantage of the long journey (to church) to exchange old stories with other old gossips … they met friends and relatives on the way, or when they reached the county town, whom they enjoyed seeing … there then followed a meal or perhaps a reciprocal invitation, which led to one relative or another….’ But if that was the way it was for the old ladies, what did Sunday mean to ‘young girls, whose blood throbbed with the sweetest desire of nature!’ We can well understand their impatience, ‘they waited for each other at the start of the road they shared,’ they danced. “Now, however, when the Tenth Day came around, ‘the men were left to the devices they always had:’ the old men went to the tavern, and they bargained. The young men drank and, deprived of their ‘lovely village girls’, they quarrelled. As for the women, they had nothing left to do in village. The mothers were miserable in their little hamlets, the daughters too, and out of this came their need to gather together in crowds. If the need for recreation is necessary because of moral forces… there is absolutely no doubt that village girls find it very hard to bear privations which are likely to prolong their unmarried state: ‘in all regions the pleasure of love is the greatest pleasure.'” – from The Revolution Against the Church, From Reason to the Supreme Being, by Michel Vovelle, pp 158-159.
- thrance 1y agoI know the real goal of the republican calendar was to undermine the Church's power by making it so Sundays would fall at random days of the week, and also screw over the workers by leaving them with a worse weekend-to-week ratio. However, all I ever read about this part of the revolution seems to indicate that people just didn't comply and went to church anyway on Sundays, and also didn't work that day. On that account, I feel likr your quote is kind of partisan. People wouldn't have been left lost and aimlessly drinking on their tenth day because of a lack of God, because they never quit going to church!
- paulorlando 1y agoNot sure I understand what you mean. At least, I thought that (most? all?) the churches were closed for the worst part of the French Revolution aftermath. For example, the new state transformed Notre Dame and other Catholic churches into Temples of Reason, from which the new state religion, the Cult of Reason, would be celebrated. It didn't last long. Hard to create a new religion quickly. Maybe some echoes of recent history there.
- thrance 1y agoIt was much more nuanced than that, and the vast majority of the French people stayed Christian during the period. Also, keep in mind the revolution was mostly a Paris thing, the rest of the country was left relatively unaffected at first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_d...
- paulorlando 1y agoIs the difference "stayed Catholic" vs the churches had to close?
- pessimizer 1y agoPretty sure it mattered when and where you were. Armies and militias were sent to put down defiant regions who had set up their own armies and militias in order to keep the Revolution out.
- mousethatroared 1y agoYa, Vendee really protests too much
- ashoeafoot 1y agohttps://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sowjetischer_Revolutionskalender https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sowjetischer_Revolutionskale... did the divide and conquer of people better by asigning them non overlapping weekends by colour
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jacquesclouseau 1y agoinb4 we still have the 8 hour workday
- nancyminusone 1y agoSadly, the 100 day year never worked quite right.
- thrance 1y agoNo but they had a clean year of 12 months, 30 days each (3 ten-day weeks) plus 5/6 holiday days at the end of the calendar (around the September equinox). Also, the months were given names by a Poet, and the days had minerals, vertues or plants instead of Saints. The calendar itself was pretty cool. Honestly, if they had 5 weeks of 6 days each instead of the 3 weeks of 10 days, I'd even call it the perfect calendar.
- Snow_Falls 1y agoMight I introduce you to visions of what could have been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform
- tempestn 1y agoBetter would be an even more fundamental change: instead of trying to standardize everything on base 10, recognize that base 8 or 16 is much more convenient in both computing and everyday life, and standardize around that.
- dragontamer 1y agoHistorically, the most convenient are numbers with large numbers of factors. 60 can be split into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 evenly for example The other number that accomplishes this is 12: 2, 3, 4, 6 are all factors. That's why 12 and 60 are so common for real life systems.
- andrepd 1y agoDefinitely not, but very composite numbers are! Like 6, 12, 24, or the best of them all, 60.
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- linguistbreaker 1y agoI hadn't heard of this and it's fun to think about. It's 100,000 s/day as opposed to our current 86,400 s/day which is not far off. Hours, however, were twice as long. They had time pieces that displayed both together.
- Swenrekcah 1y agoTheir seconds must have been about 864ms though, otherwise they day is more than 3 hours too long which would be very annoying for any kind of scheduling I’d imagine.
- IAmBroom 1y agoYes. Obviously. Or more to the point: since they had no use for milliseconds at that time, their milliseconds would have been 86.4% of standard milliseconds.
- bonzini 1y agoIt also messes up the original proposal for defining the meter, which predated the revolution and was "the length of a pendulum with a period of 2 seconds" (i.e. the pendulum would be at its lowest point once per second). Which is ironic considering that the meter was also adopted during the revolution, though with a definition not based on the length of a pendulum).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- raattgift 1y agoLatitude, mass concentrations, and climate also messed with the half-period/metre ("seconds pendulum") definition; with increasing frequency precision, one would need an almanac, an accelerometer, and probably other tools. Additionally, stabilizing the length of the pendulum under environmental conditions was already known to be tricky, with materials science unable to produce reasonably low thermal-expansion rods prior to the 20th century. Consequently, the seconds-pendulum/metre relationship gets in the way as one might want to go to sub-millimetre length precision for parts made in different locations or at different times of the day or year. Precision copies of a prototype was more reliable in practice. (In practice we mostly still generate precise and accurate physical artifacts and make copies from those, it's just that there one can in principle generate such an artifact just about anywhere and anywhen, calibrating with (for example) interferometry <https://iopscience.iop.org/book/edit/978-0-7503-1578-4/chapter/bk978-0-7503-1578-4ch1 https://iopscience.iop.org/book/edit/978-0-7503-1578-4/chapt...>) Finally, the Trinity Clock <https://clock.trin.cam.ac.uk/main.php?menu_option=theory https://clock.trin.cam.ac.uk/main.php?menu_option=theory> is a neat examination of a well known pendulum clock that's surprisingly accurate (if not really precise; it's been reliably accurate to within two seconds over the course of a month for a very long time, but it's not going to give you a 10MHz sine-wave, and it's not a good for disciplining an oscillator which does so). Do check out the various plots.
- kitten_mittens_ 1y agoIf you’re interested in a what an analog clock in decimal time might look like: https://decimal-time.netlify.app/ https://decimal-time.netlify.app/
- az09mugen 1y agoAhah nice one, thanks for sharing !
- thrance 1y agoSlightly unnerving seeing seconds pass by 15.74% faster.
- HPsquared 1y agoUncanny valley. Never seen a clock do it before.
- wyett 1y agoMy thoughts too.
- Dylan16807 1y agoNever played most of the super mario games, then? Or is that timer too abstracted?
- HPsquared 1y agoI think platform games already warp the sense of time a little. You get into the rhythm of the game. Or, say, a musical beat.
- pavlov 1y agoFeels like living in the future. Progress marches on faster than ever. Honestly a brilliant marketing move by the French revolutionaries, just a few hundred years too early.
- ucarion 1y agoAnd every other month was named after a coup d'etat!
- cafard 1y agoAs I habitually mention when the revolutionary calendar comes up, emacs calendar mode will give you the date with p-f. For what it's worth, today is Quartidi 4 Prairial an 233 de la Révolution, jour de l'Angélique. (Prairial I had heard of, jour de l'Angélique is news to me.) [edit: corrected spelling of Quartidi]
- GuB-42 1y agoAnother "fun fact" somewhat more relevant to the article is the gradient (aka. grad, or gon), it is a unit of angle equal to 1/400 of a turn, slightly smaller than a degree. It goes well with the metre because 1 km is 1/100 grad of latitude on earth. It mirrors the nautical mile in that 1 nautical mile is 1/60 degree (1 arcminute) of latitude on earth. The grad is almost never used on a day to day basis, even in France. It is still used in specialized fields, like surveying.
- vidarh 1y agoIn some languages, e.g. Norwegian, grad means degree.
- lxgr 1y agoI believe it was one out of three possible options (other than degrees and radians) to represent angles on my high school scientific calculator. Accidentally staying in "grad" mode when cycling through them (DEG -> RAD -> GRAD) was always a concern, especially since the difference between RAD and GRAD was easy to miss on the small LCD display (the indicator was via partial selection of the letters within a mask spelling "DEGRAD").
- mjevans 1y agoGiven the difference of ( 10 00 00 ) / 86400 ; they made their second ~1.1574 times faster? ( 125 : 108 , or 5 * 5 * 5 : 2 2 3 3 3 )
- lxgr 1y agoAh, this brings back fond memories of Swatch's attempt [1] at a decimal division of the day at the height of the dotcom boom. I still must have one of these digital wristwatches in some box in a closet, with a big button that starts a glorious monochrome LCD animation of "going online" (while of course the watch stayed as offline as any other Quartz watch). The thought of a watch that could actually go online seemed ridiculously utopian back then, even when everybody was otherwise dreaming of cyberspace. But only a few weeks ago, in a moment of closure spanning a quarter of a century, I finally downloaded a "Swatch Internet Time" complication – from the Internet, directly onto my wristwatch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time