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December 01, 2003
Only ze Frinch!
As the famous Agent Crabtree (always disguised as a Gendarme) in the spoof "'allo, 'allo!" was wont to say in his mangeled Franglais, "Eet eez aymozing! Noo oui con toll the tim in decimools!" Oh yes, only the cafe owner could ever decipher his statements.
In the latest issue of New Scientist is an article covering some of the zanier attempts to "modernise" or "rationalise" some fairly immutable things. One is time. It seems that the Committee for Public Safety attempted, during the French Revolution, to impose a "metricated" system of time keeping. Clocks were actually made and issues which showed the new system. This divided the day into ten hours, each of a hundred minutes. But it went further, it also divided the week into ten days and the month into three weeks.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it failed because of public resistance - they simply ignore it - and because it did not , in fact, work. Time is regulated by such mundane things as the rotation of the earth, the lunar cycle and, of course, the "atomic tick".
I find it fascinating that a committee of non scientists would even contemplate trying to change this - but then again, why not. They were politicians, right?
Just to really amuse, the original calculations which have given us the period of rotation as twenty four hours of sixty minutes to each hour, in turn having sixty seconds to each minute, are generally attributed to the Chaldeans - around 4,500 years ago.
Not bad for guys using an abacus!
Posted by The Gray Monk at December 1, 2003 12:08 AM