Decimal time

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French decimal clock from the time of the French Revolution. The outer circle shows two 12-hour clocks in Roman numerals as a total of 24 hours.

Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used to refer specifically to French Revolutionary Time, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds, as opposed to the more familiar standard time, which divides the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. MR BIRKMANS CooL Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used to refer specifically to French Revolutionary Time, which divides the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds, as opposed to the more familiar standard time, which divides the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. lick me baby!!!!!

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The main advantage of a decimal time system is that, since the base used to divide the time is the same as the one used to represent it, the whole time representation can be handled as a single string. Therefore, it becomes simpler to interpret a timestamp and to perform conversions. For instance, 1:23:00 is one decimal hour and 23 decimal minutes, or 1.23 hours, or 123 minutes; 3 hours is 300 minutes or 30,000 seconds. This property also makes it straightforward to represent a timestamp as a fractional day, so that 2024-11-02.534 can be interpreted as five decimal hours and 34 decimal minutes after the start of that date, or 0.534 (53.4%) of a day in that date. It also adjusts well to digital time representation using epochs, in that the internal time representation can be used directly for both computation and for user-facing display.

History

China

Main article: Ke (unit)

Decimal time was used in China throughout most of its history alongside dozenal time. The midnight-to-midnight day was divided into both 12 double hours (Traditional Chinese: 時辰; Simplified Chinese: 时辰; Pinyin: shíchen) and 10 shi / 100 ke (Hanzi: 刻; Pinyin: kè) by the 1st millennium BC. Other numbers of ke per day were used during three short periods, 120 ke during 5–3 BC, 96 ke during 507–544, and 108 ke during 544–565. Several of the roughly 50 Chinese calendars also divided each ke into 100 fen, although others divided each ke into 60 fen. In 1280, the Shoushi (Season Granting) calendar further subdivided each fen into 100 miao, creating a complete decimal time system of 100 ke, 100 fen and 100 miao. Chinese decimal time ceased in 1645 when the Shixian (Constant Conformity) calendar, based on European astronomy brought to China by the Jesuits, adopted 96 ke per day alongside 12 double hours, making each ke exactly one-quarter hour.

France

In 1754, Jean le Rond d'Alembert wrote in the Encyclopédie:

It would be very desirable that all divisions, for example of the livre, the sou, the toise, the day, the hour, etc. would be from tens into tens. 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.

In 1788, Claude Boniface Collignon proposed dividing the day into 10 hours or 1000 minutes, each new hour into 100 minutes, each new minute into 1000 seconds, and each new second into 1000 tierces (Latin for "third"). The distance the sun travels in one new tierce at the equator, which is one-billionth of the circumference of the earth, would be a new unit of length, provisionally called a half-handbreadth, equal to four modern centimeters. Further, the new tierce would be divided into 1000 quatierces, which he called "microscopic points of time". He also suggested a week of 10 days and dividing the year into 10 "solar months".

Decimal time was officially introduced during the French Revolution. Jean-Charles de Borda made a proposal for decimal time on November 5, 1792. The National Convention issued a decree on 5 October 1793:

XI. Le jour, de minuit à minuit, est divisé en dix parties, chaque partie en dix autres, ainsi de suite jusqu’à la plus petite portion commensurable de la durée.

XI. The day, from midnight to midnight, is divided into ten parts, each part into ten others, so on until the smallest measurable portion of duration.

These parts were named on 24 November 1793 (4 Frimaire of the Year II). The primary divisions were called hours, and they added:

La centième partie de l'heure est appelée minute décimale; la centième partie de la minute est appelée seconde décimale. (emphasis in original)

The hundredth part of the hour is called decimal minute; the hundredth part of the minute is called decimal second.

Thus, midnight was reckoned as 10 o'clock, noon as 5 o'clock, etc. 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 officially used 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 the same law which introduced the original metric system. Thus, although decimal time is sometimes referred to as metric time, the metric system at first had no time unit, and later versions of the metric system used the second, equal to 1/86400 day, as the metric time unit. In spite of this, decimal time was used in many cities, including Marseille and Toulouse, and there was a decimal clock in the Palace of the Tuileries in Paris 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.

Decimal time 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 which day the autumnal equinox occurred, in relation to true or apparent solar time at the Paris Observatory. Decimal time would also have been reckoned according to apparent solar time, depending on the location it was observed, as was already the practice generally for the setting of clocks.

At the International Meridian Conference of 1884, the following resolution was passed, at the proposal of the French delegation, by unanimous vote (with 3 abstentions):

VII. That the Conference expresses the hope that the technical studies designed to regulate and extend the application of the decimal system to the division of angular space and of time shall be resumed, so as to permit the extension of this application to all cases in which it presents real advantages.

In the 1890s, Joseph Charles François de Rey-Pailhade, president of the Toulouse Geographical Society, proposed dividing the day into 100 parts, called cés, equal to 14.4 standard minutes, and divided into 10 decicés, 100 centicés, etc. The Toulouse Chamber of Commerce adopted a resolution supporting his proposal in April 1897. Although widely published, the proposal received little backing.

The French made another attempt at the decimalization of time in 1897, when the Commission de décimalisation du temps was created by the Bureau des Longitudes, with the mathematician Henri Poincaré as secretary. The commission adopted a compromise, originally proposed by Henri de Sarrauton of the Oran Geographical Society, of retaining the 24-hour day, but dividing each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. The plan did not gain acceptance and was abandoned in 1900.

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Conversions

There are exactly 86,400 standard seconds (see SI for the current definition of the standard second) in a standard day, but in the French decimal time system there are 100,000 decimal seconds in the day, so the decimal second is shorter than its counterpart.

Decimal unit	Seconds	Minutes	Hours	h:mm:ss.s
Decimal second	0.864	0.0144	0.00024	0:00:00.9
Decimal minute	86.4	1.44	0.024	0:01:26.4
Decimal hour	8,640	144	2.4	2:24:00.0

Accounting

Decimal time is commonly used in accounting for payrolls and hourly billing in the form of decimal hours. Time clocks typically record the time of day in tenths or hundredths of an hour. For instance, 8:30 am would be recorded as 08.50. This is intended to make accounting easier by eliminating the need to convert between minutes and hours.

Fractional days

Mobile phone running the 100% clock widget which shows how many percent of the day have passed.

The most common use of decimal time of day is as fractional days used by scientists and computer programmers. Standard 24-hour time is converted into a fractional day simply by dividing the number of hours elapsed since midnight by 24 to make a decimal fraction. Thus, midnight is 0.0 day, noon is 0.5 d, etc., which can be added to any type of date, including (all of which refer to the same moment):

• Gregorian dates: 2000 January 1.5
• Two-line elements: 00001.5
• Julian dates: 2451545.0
• Excel serial dates: 36526.5

As many decimal places may be used as required for precision, so 0.5 d = 0.500000 d. Fractional days are often reckoned in UTC or TT, although Julian Dates use pre-1925 astronomical date/time (each date began at 0^h thus ".0" = noon) and Microsoft Excel uses the local time zone of the computer. Using fractional days reduces the number of units in time calculations from four (days, hours, minutes, seconds) to just one (days).

Fractional days are often used by astronomers to record observations, and were expressed in relation to Paris Mean Time by the 18th century French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace, as in these examples:

... et la distance périhélie, égale à 1,053095 ; ce qui a donné pour l'instant du passage au périhélie, sept.29^j,10239, temps moyen compté de minuit à Paris.

Les valeurs précédentes de a, b, h, l, relatives à trois observations, ont donné la distance périhélie égale à 1,053650; et pour l'instant du passage, sept.29^j,04587; ce qui diffère peu des résultats fondés sur cinq observations.

— Pierre-Simon Laplace, Traité de Mécanique Céleste

Fractional days have been used by astronomers ever since. For instance, the 19th century British astronomer John Herschel gave these examples:

Between Greenwich noon of the 22d and 23d of March, 1829, the 1828th equinoctial year terminates, and the 1829th commences. This happens at 0^d·286003, or at 6^h 51^m 50^s·66 Greenwich Mean Time ... For example, at 12^h 0^m 0^s Greenwich Mean Time, or 0^d·500000...

— John Herschel, Outlines of Astronomy

Fractional days are commonly used to express epochs of orbital elements. The decimal fraction is usually added to the calendar date or Julian day for natural objects, or to the ordinal date for artificial satellites in two-line elements.

Decimal multiples and fractions of the second

The second is the International System of Units (SI) unit of time duration. It is also the standard single-unit time representation in many programming languages, most notably C, and part of UNIX/POSIX standards used by Linux, Mac OS X, etc.; to convert fractional days to fractional seconds, multiply the number by 86400. Fractional seconds are represented as milliseconds (ms), microseconds (μs) or nanoseconds (ns). Absolute times are usually represented relative to 1 January 1970, at midnight. Other systems may use a different zero point.

In principle, time spans greater than one second are given in units such as kiloseconds (ks), megaseconds (Ms), gigaseconds (Gs), and so on. Occasionally, these units can be found in technical literature, but traditional units like minutes, hours, days and years are much more common, and are accepted for use with SI.

It is possible to specify the time of day as the number of kiloseconds elapsed since midnight. Thus, instead of saying 3:45 p.m. one could say (time of day) 56.7 ks. There are exactly 86.4 ks in one day. However, this system is hardly used in practice.

Scientific decimal time

Scientists often record (rather than observe) time as decimals. For example, decimal days divides the day into 10 equal parts, and decimal years divides the year into 10 equal parts. Decimals are easier to plot than both (a) minutes and seconds, which uses the Sexagesimal numbering system, (b) hours, months and days, which has irregular month lengths. In astronomy, the so-called Julian day uses decimal days centered on noon.

Decimal seconds in a decimal minute

Since there are 60 seconds in a minute, a tenth part represents 60/10 = 6 seconds.

Conversion between decimal minutes seconds
Decimal Minutes	0.1	0.2	0.3	0.4	0.5	0.6	0.7	0.8	0.9	1.0
Second	6s	12s	18s	24s	30s	36s	42s	48s	54s	60s

Decimal minutes in an decimal hour

Since there are 60 minutes in an hour, a tenth part represents 60/10 = 6 minutes.

Conversion between decimal hours and minutes
Decimal Hours	0.1	0.2	0.3	0.4	0.5	0.6	0.7	0.8	0.9	1.0
Minutes	6m	12m	18m	24m	30m	36m	42m	48m	54m	60m

Decimal hours in a decimal day

Since there are 24 hours in a day, a tenth part represents 24/10 = 2.4 hours (2 hours and 24 minutes).

Conversion between decimal day, and, Hours and minutes
Decimal Days	0.1	0.2	0.3	0.4	0.5	0.6	0.7	0.8	0.9	1.0
Hours:Minutes	2h 24m	4h 48m	7h 12m	9h 36m	12h	14h 24m	16h 48m	19h 12m	21h 36m	24h

Decimal months in a year

Since there are about 365 days in a year, there are about 365/10 = 36.5 days in a tenth of a year. Hence the year 2000.5 represents the day 2 July 2000. More exactly, a year is 365.25 days long, so a tenth of the year is 36.525 days (36 days, 12 hours, 36 minutes).

Conversion between decimal years, and, Date
Decimal Years	0.1	0.2	0.3	0.4	0.5	0.6	0.7	0.8	0.9	1.0
Days	36.525	73.050	109.575	146.100	182.625	219.150	255.675	292.200	328.725	365.250
Date Time	5 Feb 12:36	14 Mar 1:15	19 Apr 13:48	26 May 2:24	1 Jul 15:00	7 Aug 3:45	12 Sep 16:12	19 Oct 4:48	24 Nov 17:24	1 year

In leap years, all days after 28 Feb occur one day earlier

Aviation

For aviation purposes, where it is common to add times in an already complicated environment, time tracking is simplified by recording decimal fractions of hours, so, for instance, if you add 1:36, and 2:36 instead of getting 3:72 and converting it to 4:12 you add 1.6 and 2.6 and get 4.2 hours.

Other decimal times

Numerous individuals have proposed variations of decimal time, dividing the day into different numbers of units and subunits with different names. Most are based upon fractional days, so that one decimal time format may be easily converted into another, such that all the following are equivalent:

• 0.500 fractional day
• 5h 0m French decimal time
• @500.beats Swatch Internet Time (see below)
• 50.0 kes or cés (centidays)
• 500 millidays
• 50.0% Percent Time
• 12:00 Standard Time

Some decimal time proposals are based upon alternate units of metric time. The difference between metric time and decimal time is that metric time defines units for measuring time interval, as measured with a stopwatch, and decimal time defines the time of day, as measured by a clock. Just as standard time uses the metric time unit of the second as its basis, proposed decimal time scales may use alternative metric units.

Swatch Internet Time

Main article: Swatch Internet Time

On 23 October 1998, the Swiss watchmaking company, Swatch, introduced a decimal time called Swatch Internet Time, which divides the day into 1000 .beats (each 86.4 s) counted from 000–999, with @000 being midnight and @500 being noon CET (UTC +1), as opposed to UTC. The company sold watches which displayed Internet Time.

Internet Time has been criticized for using an origin different from Universal Time, misrepresenting CET as "Biel Meridian Time", and for not providing for more precise units, although third-party applications have proposed "centibeats" (864 ms) and "millibeats" (86.4 ms).

Decimal times in fiction

Some science fiction authors use decimal time to reinforce the sense of "otherworldliness", notably in Infocom's Planetfall and Stationfall games, which use "1 chronon = 1/10000 day" such that 0000 = midnight and 5000 = noon.

Isaac Asimov also uses and describes the use of decimal time by the humans from the planet Solaria in his novel The Naked Sun, in which he describes the Solarian hour as being divided into ten decads, each of which is divided into a hundred centads.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky include human cultures that base time on seconds and multiples of seconds, with one "kilosecond" equal to 1,000 seconds (or approximately 15 minutes), one "megasecond" equal to 1,000,000 seconds (or approximately two weeks), and one "gigasecond" equal to 1,000,000,000 seconds (or approximately 30 years).

Joan D. Vinge's The Outcasts of Heaven Belt starts with a logarithmic chart comparing seconds with metric prefixes to standard names (1s to 10^10s).

Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars tells the story of a starship crew that structure their calendar in "tendays" instead of weeks. Tendays are also mentioned in Diane Duane's The Wounded Sky.

Fritz Lang's science fiction film Metropolis depicts what is often misinterpreted as a decimal clock, as it has ten numerals, but it actually measures a workers' shift of ten conventional hours in one cycle, not decimal hours. Since a normal day cannot be divided into a whole number of such shifts, a 24-hour clock is displayed above the shift clock to give the actual time of day.

In the episode of The Simpsons titled "They Saved Lisa's Brain", the members of Springfield's Mensa make changes to their town, including the implementation of "metric time" to determine the time of day. Dr. Hibbert comments that the time is "eighty past ten". Using "metric time" to indicate decimal time, Principal Skinner comments that the city's trains are not only running on time, but they are running on metric time, while looking at an analog clock with numbers 1–10.

In the original Battlestar Galactica television series, both the Colonials and the Cylon Alliance employed a decimal time system. An are was an equivalent of an hour but was nearly twice as long. A centon was 1/100th of an are, in the same order of magnitude as a minute. A micron [sic] was 1/1000 of an are, on the same order of magnitude as a second. A centare was 100 are units and represented the same order of magnitude of time as a week. A yahren was 100 centare units and represented the same order of magnitude as a year. Usage of these terms was not always consistent. In the pilot, "Saga of a Star World", Lew Ayres as President Adar used the term "years". And occasionally, the terms above were used inconsistently, or other time terms were used in place of those listed above which seemed to be the same as one of those defined above (e.g. Secton).

The Warhammer 40,000 science fiction wargame universe uses a dating system that includes a year fraction, dividing the year into 1,000 equal parts (just over 8 hours each). Dates include an optional accuracy specifier, year fraction, year, and millennium so you see dates like 0123456.M41, which would be the decimal year 40456.123 with an accuracy of 0 (on earth).

The stardates used in Star Trek represented the time of day as a decimal fraction, so that they incremented by 0.1 every tenth of a day. In addition, in Star Trek:The Next Generation and its spin-offs, years were divided into 1000 stardates. The stardates in the 2009 film did not use decimal time, however.

The wall stopwatch with 100-second dial was used in the sheep contest in part 6 (out of 10) of The 10th Kingdom miniseries.

See also

• Decimal calendar
• French Republican Calendar
• Hexadecimal time
• List of unusual units of measurement

• Stardate
• Unix time
• 12-hour clock
• 24-hour clock

References

• National Convention of the French Republic (1793) LE CALENDRIER RÉPUBLICAIN Textes officiels Décrets Relatifs à l'établissement de l'Ère Républicaine published by Philippe Chapelin 2002
• Sizes, Inc. (2000) decimal time units Last revised 27 February 2004
• Herschel, John (1849) Outlines of Astronomy published by Gallica 1995
• Carrigan, Richard A., Jr. "Decimal Time". American Scientist, (May–June 1978), 66(3): 305–313.

External links

• Decimal Time Applet - with digital and analogue representations.
• What DIME is it? (Dime = Decimal Time) (Decimal time Java applet by Sergey Zaitsev.)
• Live Decimal Time in Javascript.