Living in retirement, I live without a watch, but when I do go into town where I have to watch my time, I always wear my pensioner's wristwatch which gets me plenty of pitiful looks and plenty of pensioner's discounts everywhere I go.
Which neatly brings me to the subject of this blog: everybody knows that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute. But in 1793, the French smashed the old clock system in favour of French Revolutionary Time, which was a 10-hour day, with 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute. This thoroughly modern system had a few practical benefits, chief among them being a simplified way to do time-related math. If we want to know when a day is 80% complete, decimal time simply says "at the end of the eighth hour," whereas standard time requires us to say "at 19 hours, 12 minutes." French Revolutionary Time was a more elegant solution to that math problem. The problem was that every living person already had a well-established way of telling the time, and old habits die hard!
In fact, it has been a well-established way of telling the time for about 5,000 years because we inherited it from the Sumerians who based their numbering system on the number 60. This is because the ancient Sumerians didn't know how to write fractions, yet they often needed to know what a "half" or a "third" of something was. To solve the problem, a Sumerian mathematician decided to base their numbering system on the number 60, which can easily be divided by both halves and thirds. Our number 10 can only be divided by 2 or 5 if a whole number answer is desired, whereas 60 can be divided by 10 different numbers that provided answers without fractions (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30).
I thought you would like to know. Perhaps you would also like to know that I do have a "real" wristwatch which I bought in my "salad days" in Singapore in 1984 for S$4,900, which was then worth some AUS$2,550.
I've just checked online and the very same watch is worth around AUS$12,000 today, which is why I don't wear it to town as I don't want to lose all those lovely pensioner's discounts. Just don't tell them, okay?
It usually takes me close to an hour to type each blog post to keep the old grey matter ticking over, and my 100 minutes are just about up.
