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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Decimal time | 2/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T11:12:32.390542+00:00 | kb-cron |
VIII. Each month is divided into three equal parts, of ten days each, which are called décades... XI. The day, from midnight to midnight, is divided into ten parts or hours, each part into ten others, so on until the smallest measurable portion of the duration. The hundredth part of the hour is called decimal minute; the hundredth part of the minute is called decimal second. This article will not be required for the public records, until from the 1st of Vendémiaire, the year three of the Republic. (September 22, 1794) (emphasis in original) Thus, midnight was called dix heures ("ten hours"), noon was called cinq heures ("five hours"), etc.
==== Representation ====
The colon (:) was not yet in use as a unit separator for standard times, and is used for non-decimal bases. The French decimal separator is the comma (,), while the period (.), or "point", is used in English. Units were either written out in full, or abbreviated. Thus, five hours eighty three minutes decimal might be written as 5 h. 83 m. Even today, "h" is commonly used in France to separate hours and minutes of 24-hour time, instead of a colon, such as 14h00. Midnight was represented in civil records as "ten hours". Times between midnight and the first decimal hour were written without hours, so 1:00 am, or 0.41 decimal hours, was written as "four décimes" or "forty-one minutes". 2:00 am (0.8333) was written as "eight décimes", "eighty-three minutes", or even "eighty-three minutes thirty-three seconds". As with duodecimal time, decimal time was represented according to true solar time, rather than mean time, with noon being marked when the sun reached its highest point locally, which varied at different locations, and throughout the year. In "Methods to find the Leap Years of the French Calendar", Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre used three different representations for the same decimal time:
0,386 (comma is the decimal sign in French) 0j386 ("j" is for jour, day in French) 3h 86' (apostrophe is for minutes)
Sometimes in official records, decimal hours were divided into tenths, or décimes, instead of minutes. One décime is equal to 10 decimal minutes, which is nearly equal to a quarter-hour (15 minutes) in standard time. Thus, "five hours two décimes" equals 5.2 decimal hours, roughly 12:30 p.m. in standard time. One hundredth of a decimal second was a decimal tierce.
==== Usage ==== Although clocks and watches were produced with faces showing both standard time with numbers 1–24 and decimal time with numbers 1–10, decimal time never caught on; it was not used for public records until the beginning of the Republican year III, 22 September 1794, and mandatory use was suspended 7 April 1795 (18 Germinal of the Year III). In spite of this, decimal time was used in many cities, including Marseille and Toulouse, where a decimal clock with just an hour hand was on the front of the Capitole for five years. In some places, decimal time was used to record certificates of births, marriages, and deaths until the end of Year VIII (September 1800). On the Palace of the Tuileries in Paris, two of the four clock faces displayed decimal time until at least 1801. The mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace had a decimal watch made for him, and used decimal time in his work, in the form of fractional days. Decimal time was part of a larger attempt at decimalisation in revolutionary France (which also included decimalisation of currency and metrication) and was introduced as part of the French Republican Calendar, which, in addition to decimally dividing the day, divided the month into three décades of 10 days each; this calendar was abolished at the end of 1805. The start of each year was determined according to the day of the autumnal equinox, in relation to true or apparent solar time at the Paris Observatory.