Much to the chagrin of many living in North America who still need to do things like keep two sets of wrenches on hand, most of the rest of the world has standardized to a simpler measurement system using metric units exclusively. The metric system is widely adopted worldwide, but we still use a base-60 system for timekeeping that predates the rest of the metric system. The French did attempt to “decimalize” timekeeping as well with the French Republican Calendar at around this same time, but this “metric” timekeeping system never caught on particularly well. It’s still an interesting historical tidbit, and [ClassTech] built this modern metric clock to explore it a little more.
The system itself uses ten-day weeks, ten-hour days, and 100-minute hours which makes it more in line with the base-10 system common to the rest of the metric system. But this means that a second in the French Republican system actually works out to a little less than one and a half SI seconds, meaning that a modern timekeeping computer needs to do a little more math to display the correct time at the correct interval. [ClassTech] is using a Particle Photon IoT processor getting the time from a NTP server, converting it to “metric time”, and displaying the time on a Nextion touch display.
While the device is reported to update the time once per second, we’re not sure if this is every SI second or every French Republican second. Either way, there are plenty of reasons this timekeeping system never gained widespread adoption, and a surprising one is that timekeeping tends to be easier in a base-60 system due to its capability of having more divisors. Many other reasons are less technical and more cultural, and timekeeping tends to be surprisingly difficult to coordinate even among shared numbers systems and languages.
Mmm… Lobster Thermidor.
As romantic of an idea it is to only have one unit to rule them all… I still see people in metric happy land, working on machines that were made in metric happy land, needing to deal with non metric crap all the time
Yeah, some sneaky person decided to place the pins of my DIP chips 2.54mm apart for some reason…
Not much later, another sneaky person on another continent tried to sabotage the industry by getting 2.5 mm accepted for a DIN standard, which was mostly ignored and soon abandoned. But he partially succeeded: many, if not all, Eastern Bloc countries adopted this failed standard and produced mechanically incompatible clones of western chips.
Citation needed.
ГОСТ 17467 and various data books from Eastern Bloc manufacturers, available on archive.org. Try to plug a Soviet КР580ВМ80А (8080A clone) into a western IC socket and see for yourself.
Didn’t the commies do 2mm spacing at one point?
Literature only mentions 0.625, 1, 1.25, 1.7 and 2.5mm spacing for ICs.
btw: the book series “Интегральные микросхемы и их зарубежные аналоги” has information on nearly all ICs ever made by the Soviets.
http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/N/NEFEDOV_Anatoliy_Vladimirovich/_Nefedov_A.V..html
I have a very old memory about 2mm pitch ICs from somewhere. Maybe someone thought it was a good idea at one point.
I know 2mm pitch headers & connectors exist, not sure why. Be nice if they didn’t.
Maybe DIPs 1.78mm (0.07″)? Often found in TV sets from the 1990s. Was also used with the then famous and now mostly forgotten HD64180.
AFAIK the 2mm connectors are a Japanese thing, I wouldn’t be surprised if they made ICs with that spacing, they have a lot of unusually sized ICs.
Give them an inch…!
… And they will take a kilometer!
(Or 1.61)
:)
I suspect you probably already know, but 2.54 mm is .01″, a long established standard when the US was the world leader in this stuff, and changing the standard os a bigger headache than living with the “anomaly”; it could be worse, I’ve got some really old connectors built on 1/16“ spacing
2.54mm is actually approx 0.1″ and not 0.01″
Imperial unit is indeed a mess…
2.54mm is precisely 0.1″.
Imperial got redefined to make it exactly so.
The next time they try to introduce metric time they should avoid the word metric and instead call it ‘stardate’ (or some such).
See if that will get people on-board
And yes I can confirm you can’t avoid imperial in europe, both plumbing and electrical conduits for instance come in imperial measurement in this area. And that isn’t even global stuff like say tripod screws where you can argue having several standards would be annoying.
Now I suddenly wonder if Apple disliked the headphone socket because it was in metric.. you never know with these CEO’s.
I suppose there’s some truth within.
What’s often being a bit forgotten, though, is that we Europeans had imperial many moons ago, as well.
It’s not something the US owns all for itself. And we got rid of it, for good. On purpose.
I remember my grandma still using old terms such as “pound”, “dozen” and “centner”. Often in conjunction with buying groceries and cooking..
The problem with these old units was, that they could differ among towns.
Each town or village had its own understanding of it.
It was like with local time, so to say (sun clock, sun dial).
Some measurement units like “ell” (cubit) did vary among people, even.
A seller was using his/her own body parts as a reference. Ridiculous.
That’s why standardization was such a big thing.
And why we probably think that using “feet” and “foot” as measurement units is a silly idea. We had been there.
(Speaking under correction, of course. I can’t speak for all people, of course.)
It’s just half baked solution. They decided to standardize a feet length, but never made mandatory for people to have the same feet length. With a true standardization, surgeons would become rich, but it would make commerce a lot easier (why producing so many different pair of shoes if everyone had a 33cm long feet?)
That mixed up system of bits and pieces where each town had its own version was NOT the imperial system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units
The imperial system had definitions for many common measurements. Their use was law in Britain, where the imperial system came from.
That mixed up mess you are talking about are the left overs from the middle ages.
Even before the adoption of the imperial system in Britain in 1826, there were standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_units
Germany couldn’t adopt a national standard until after 1871 because there wasn’t a single German nation until that year.
Up until then, each of the smaller German states used their own standards. Since many of the smaller German states were actually individual towns, you had a horrible mixed up mess of measuring systems in use all over the place.
It’s not like the old systems are completely gone, either.
Older folks where I live here in Germany will still refer to “ein Pfund Fleisch” when they buy meat at the grocery store or the butcher shop.
The “Pfund”, which Germans still use, is actually “metric” and was defined as 500g in 1858 by the Zollverein.
Viewed that way, the entire US measurement system is metric. All US units are defined in terms of the metric system.
The US customary units have been defined in terms of the metric system since 1893.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
That is to say, if the definition of the meter were changed to be longer, then the US inch and foot would also automatically be longer.
@Joseph Eoff
Yeah, those “freedom units” have been metric for a long time, but they are not decimal. To make matters worse, they are complemeted with even more silly units like AWG and cmil. And drill bits that bear numbers instead of the diameter…
“It’s not like the old systems are completely gone, either.
Older folks where I live here in Germany will still refer to “ein Pfund Fleisch” when they buy meat at the grocery store or the butcher shop.”
If you mean the 80+ generation by “older folks”, then yes. They aren’t “completely gone, either” yet.
Nah. Not 80, not even 70. 50 and 60 year old folks say it – and the kids understand them.
“Nah. Not 80, not even 70. 50 and 60 year old folks say it – and the kids understand them.”
I don’t think so, please double check.
The people using it regularly still were my parent’s parents. Past 60, at the very least.
Normal in the UK to use all sorts of mixed units depending on case and audience. And for that mix to change depending on generation. No-one uses Km, but most people use m these days, except those over 50, who probably stick to feet, but might still measure their DIY shelf in cm etc. My own personal training as a metric design eng is completely over-ridden in normal daily home life by a natural tendency to start in mm for small measurement, up to about a metre, then from there jump to feet and miles. Whacky.
I am 40 years old and live in The Netherlands. I bought some cheese in a cheese shop the other day from a girl that couldn’t have been older than 20. I said “Een half pond” (half a (metric) pound) and she didn’t flinch, put the knife on the cheese and lo, I got 259 grammes of cheese.
I do a woodworking course, and we do everything in milimeters, but we buy our wood in thicknesses of 1, 1.5 or 2 “duim” (thumb, inch), which is defined as “26 mm” but being measured when fresh and now dried, might be a few mm less now.
In my line of work I use a lot of semicustom units, like time that goes on up to 32:00 (6 hours after midnight), and a week always starts on sunday (in normal Dutch culture, monday is the start of the week), and the weeks are “even” or “odd” independent of the week number, but dependent of the rotation start date which might be a sunday after the 2nd saturday of december, several years in the past.
For our electric buses we use kWh/h to calculate discharge and kW for charging (the former is an average which doesn’t include peak demand, the latter is just a fixed current)
Dozen isn’t metric or imperial, it’s just a count. And my foot is a foot long, so that’s actually quite useful for measuring (though elbow to wrist is more convenient than taking my shoes off)
“…disliked the headphone socket because it was in metric..”
Hmmm… It doesn’t look and feel metric in any way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)
2.5 mm (1⁄10 in) mono (TS)
3.5 mm (1⁄8 in) mono (TS)
3.5 mm (1⁄8 in) stereo (TRS)
6.35 mm (1⁄4 in) stereo (TRS)
If you actually read the (long) article you would have spotted this line:
“The 3.5 mm and 2.5 mm sizes are sometimes called 1⁄8 in and 3⁄32 in respectively in the United States, though those dimensions are only approximations.”
I did actually check before posting :)
Hmm — always thought 3.5 mm to be an approximation for 1/8 inch, no?
It’s very hard to find a definitive answer outside that Wikipedia statement regarding the 3.5mm variant.,and all sources I manage to find so far just say that it was introduced for transistor radios, and that Sony was big early in that field.
Still, we all know it as the 3.5mm jack don’t we? Don’t you refer to it that way in the US too most often?
Quite right; I am old enough to remember when these connectors wre referred to only in inch based sizing, since they were of US origin. Even though I understand and am comfortable in the metric system, to me these plugs and jacks are still eighth and quarter inch
Thing is though, there’s Imperial and US Imperial ‘freedom unit’ lovers can’t even agree on which is the one true imperial whereas (AFAIK) Metric is Metric is Metric
CCXXXII…is that the year? 232? Should that not be MMXXIII? Or has the weights of the roman numerals also changed in this metric time system?
The metric system was born from the French Revolution, which also caused the de-christianization of France. I think it’d be a bit inappropriate the birth of JC become a reference point of the new calendar. I leave you guess what happened 232 years ago ;)
I already think it would be a bit presumptuous to mark the birth of Christ as the start of time, but the French revolution? I suppose it makes sense. This is the human way of doing things…as soon as we get our way, then history gets cancelled…we cannot deal with the fact that things didn’t always go our way…it never happened. And we wonder why we “never learn from history”.
No wonder I end up (re)watching so much Star Trek. :-)
It’s the 232nd year of the French First Republic, comrade!
Please don’t confuse decimal time and the French Revolutionary calendar with metric time. While decimal time has been abandoned, metric time is in widespread use today – even in the remaining countries that still use the “freedom units” of their former oppressors.
I’m wondering why Swatch time (internet time) wasn’t being mentioned so far.
It’s using decimal, as well.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
I’m not sure if this ever was a thing outside of the D-A-CH region. It didn’t last long and was soon forgotten. And using ‘@’ was a major flaw, because that character was already established to denote Unix time (which is metric).
Okay, but then Unix time isn’t exactly relevant, either. If anything is, it’s UTC.
Or stardates, for the astronomy community. :)
> While the device is reported to update the time once per second, we’re not sure if this is every SI second or every French Republican second
This is confusing. Whatever the second duration, it would results to the same. If the French republican second was 23 of the SI’s second, updating to the SI’s second would results in 22 times the exact same output, so there’s actually no point in doing that.
In the end, whatever second you’re using for your clock, updating only changes something when there is a change to notice, that is: to the French RS (because it’s actually longer).
Meanwhile, if we could end daylight saving time in all of the EU, and just keep standard time… some people would like to end Standard time and keep daylight saving all year long… just go to bed earlier and wake up earlier…
Just go to bed earlier and wake up earlier…
That sounds like a good idea if you assume that you can go to work earlier and leave work earlier.
But many people do not choose their working hours, and prefer having free time after work than before work, so as not to have their free time cut in half by the work day.
I would say that it makes more sense to wake up when the sun rises rather than at fixed hours, so if daylight saving time can make us wake up a little closer to when the sun rises, it still makes sense from a biological point of view.
We should wake up even earlier than we do in summer, and even later than we do in winter, but that’s not how the world works.
Waking up before the sun rises is nonsense from a biological point of view. Getting up after the sun rises and then using fake artificial electric lights is a waste of sunlight, it’s like growing your own food, throwing it in the bin to later buy it in the supermarket.
I agree that you cannot choose when to go to work.
I was saying that, as a society, they should all go to bed earlier.
Either we alternate standard time and daylight saving, or it simply has no sense to keep daylight saving time all year long… we could keep standard time and move 1 time zone eastward, it would be the same.
I’m surprised nobody has commented that the reason we have 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute is because the Sumerians, for reasons that have never been elucidated, counted in sixties. Cuneiform numerals are a sort of semi-place-value system (there was no sign for zero) in which each column is 60 times bigger than the previous one. They used a 12 hour day, though, so their hours, minutes and seconds were each twice as long as ours.
Has that not been elucidated? I thought it was because they did Asian style finger counting up to 12 on one hand and used the digits on the other hand to count 5 of those.
“for reasons that have never been elucidated” … maybe not in the English Wikipedia, but elsewhere:
You can not only count to 5 with one hand, but also to 12 (4 fingers with 3 phalanx bones + thumb as pointer). Makes it easy to count to 60 or even 144 with both hands. This method is still in use in some regions.
I count to 12 (and need be: 24) with one hand all the time and I still can’t believe this isn’t taught in schools…
I once read that the old romans used a 12 hour day, and the day was from dawn till dusk, which means the length of an hour varied considerably during the year. Whatever happened in those hours without sunlight just did not count at all.
Before we invented the light bulb, sure we had candles and all sorts of lamps, but those weren’t very good, so I would guess people would sleep during the 12 other hours, that would make sense.
I’m not so sure; in times past, many worked from can see to can’t see on the farms or in cities, and still had chores to do at home, and were lucky if they could get a decent night’s sleep. The eight hour work day was an invention of the labor movement.
I don’t know about the Romans, but that was certainly the case in medieval England. They used 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night.
We actually have a vestige of this in modern English: noon is derived from none (it’s Latin, so pronounce the e) meaning ninth and referring to the ninth hour of the day. Now the day varied in length so nones at midsummer in England would be getting close to 5pm whereas at midwinter it wouldn’t pass 2pm.
There were other varieties of this apparently religious activity going on all over the shop, read more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_hours
Seems as though metric time or decimal time or whatever you want to call it, is a solution in search of a problem. What previously-insurmountable problem with timekeeping would be solved by implementing a new arrangement, with all the accompanying headaches that it would produce?
It’s not like the metric system, where the Imperial system it would replace is irrational in a global sense, and the units have different names; inch/foot/yard vs. meter, kg vs. lb/oz., etc. If I tell my friend “I’ll be there in an hour and a half”, we need to be talking about the same hour.
Now if you want to call the units something totally different…as in Battlestar Galactica, where a ‘micron’ was a unit of time…. :-D
Just rambling on an early Thanksgiving morning.
I would like to humbly point out that the time system is base 60 down to seconds then it becomes metric below.
I remember when traveling accross the USA I quicly understood that it was totally futile to try to understand the local way of counting hours with the am/pm mixture which does not correspond to any logic :
You go from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm… where is the logic?
This of course made me miss a few planes, after which I came to speak with 24-hour days. But people then told me I spoke like a military !
Thing is that’s not even metric, it just uses units that are a multiple of ten, metric time would have a second, decasecond, hectosecond, kilosecond, etc
Like inches, yards, foot, yadayada, I would not be surprised if someone decides to measure time in eyeblinks, stepping times, munching steps. In fractions of course
For some reason the English speaking world is yard-shy, they rather, even for long distances, use feet than the yard, even when it would be more convenient to use yard. It’s odd.