Grub-hoe

Practically every day in the French Republican Calendar is named after a plant, animal, mineral, or farm tool, collectively known as the “rural calendar.” Today, Décadi, Brumaire 20, is being reported on Twitter, er, X, and the various apps as being “Grub-hoe” day. Grub-hoe? What is that? How is it different from a regular hoe? 

Wall calendars

Romme’s calendar

There were historically two French Republican calendars:

1. Gilbert Romme's original calendar, which was the only one legally recognized, began each year on the day of the autumn equinox, causing leap years to occur haphazardly, according to Romme’s method. 
2. The reformed calendar, which never reached the National Convention, began each year according to fixed mathematical rules proposed by Jean Baptiste Delambre, with leap years occurring on a regular schedule, similar to the Gregorian calendar. The reason that the reformed calendar did not reach the Convention was that on that same day, Romme was sentenced to the guillotine and committed suicide. 

Stardates explained

I ran across this video that sounds a lot like me. It talks about different methods to produce stardates in the present. 

Reformed conversions

I added a date picker to the conversions page recently and I was just testing it, and noticed that the results for the French reformed calendar were off. The results are correct for 2005–2039, but outside that range sometimes they aren’t. I think I just forgot that I didn’t work out the algorithm, and since many dates were correct, I didn’t notice. I could just let it be and accept that there is a limited range of valid dates, or I could start over from scratch, since that would probably be easier than integrating new code into the existing function. In fact, I retested the same function with the original French Republican Calendar, and it works correctly, which is surprising, since it has to calculate the date of the equinox for every year, which seems harder than adding a day every four years. 

Swatch Internet Time

Swatch no longer promotes its Internet Time beats, but I found an archived version of its Swatch Internet Time page from 2002. See the brochure.

Flash clock

An archive of the clock from an old version of this site. Original page.  

Lavoisier

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, in a convocation letter to the members of the Commission for weights and measurements, for October 13, 1793, (22 vendémiaire an II) expressed himself in terms of the new regulations: “We remind you, dear citizen, that the Commission for weights and measurements shall meet, from now on, on the 2nd and 5th and 8th of each decade, at 7 decimal hours exactly (4 hours 48 minutes in the afternoon in the old style).”

An interesting use of decimal time. Note that he gave an exact decimal time, then translated that into “old style,” rather than the other way around. He also refers to the décade, rather than the week. Meetings are to be held every third day with a three-day weekend. 

This was when decimal time and the calendar were first introduced. He died in prison shortly after that, in the unfortunate snuffing of a leading light of science, another victim of the times. 

Current stardates

Captain’s log, stardate 78862.1.  

Amongst the date and time formats I’ve supported on this site is the current stardate. But since there is no consensus or single version that is accepted, I’ve gone back and forth with which to use. Initially, I used Modified Julian Dates, but then I started using TrekGuide’s formula, as that was consistent with when TNG, DS9, and Voyager episodes aired, but those episodes haven’t aired for decades. 

Other decimal times

We tend to think of decimal time as a division of the day, but there are other bases, too. 

 Many companies use decimal time for payroll or hourly billing, with hours as the base, divided into hundredths. So 6:30 PM is written as 18.50. Punch clocks like this are common. 

 Astronomers sometimes divide years into decimals such as 2023.789. 

Computers often use Unix time, which counts seconds, sometimes divided into milliseconds and microseconds, like 1699042927.711. 

 So there is already a whole world of decimal time already in use!

International Astronomical Union

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has been using decimal time in its telegraphed circulars for over a century. Following the recommendations of the IAU, the dates of observations, or of astronomical events, should be written in the order of year, month, day, so that in principle it can be appended by the decimal fraction of a day. An example decimal time would be 2023 Nov. 3.1234 UT, where .1234 is the time of day represented as a fraction. All times are Universal Time (GMT). This fraction is identical to MJD, but with a Gregorian calendar date. 

 For an actual example, see IAU circular

History

You may wonder, what did decimal time actually look like in history? I’ve read thousands of records from the Revolution and can tell you. See here for actual examples.

Web clock

I just noticed that the HTML5 clock on this page shows Comic Sans on Windows PC instead of cursive. I think I have now fixed that. I also added some drop shadows to make it look more 3D. There is also now a little hand for day of the week (décade) which is also indicated by text, (Decadi, Primidi, etc.) Let me know what you think. There is a larger version here. 

It’s blue, white, and red to match the tricolour flag, with a Phrygian cap to celebrate the French Revolution. It’s written in HTML5 and JavaScript. I made my first decimal clock in AT-BASIC over 40 years ago. That one was more…basic. I used to have Java clocks ⏰ 🕰️ on my old website, but this one’s better. 

Rey-Pailhade clock

A decimal clock built in the 1890s, dividing the day into 100 parts. Midnight is a the bottom and there is only one hand. 

J. de Rey Pailhade (designer)

Decimal System Wall Clock, Systeme J. De Rey Pailhade 

L. Leroy & Cie, Paris: c. 1890s

Enamel face, gilt hour hand, glazed lid, mahogany case

21.5 inches diameter

Source

Salut et Fraternité

Get decimal time on your watch! 

My favorite decimal time app for iPhone, Salut et Fraternité by Olivier Noel (Brumaire), has just been updated for the first time in five years. Version 2.8 includes an Apple Watch app. The app shows the Republican date and decimal time, with an analog display resembling an old-style pocket watch face. There is also a widget for your iPhone Home Screen. 

It now supports both the original, equinox, rule, as well as the “Romme” 4-year rule. (“Romme” actually calculates leap years one year before others count it, so that it starts with year 3 as a leap year.)

[App Store]

Twitter

X, formerly Twitter, seems to be going down the drain. Not just in obvious ways  There used to be a number of accounts which tweeted the Republican calendar date daily. Together, they have thousands of followers! I don't know if they're cracking down on bots, or raising prices, or what, but they've been shutting down over the past few months. 

Fromental Halévy

Fromental Halévy (27 May 1799 – 17 March 1862), was a French composer. The name Fromental (meaning 'oat grass'), by which he was generally known, reflects his birth on the day dedicated to that plant: 7 Prairial in the French Revolutionary calendar, which was still operative at that time. Children were supposed to be named from the new calendar, instead of the Catholic Calendar of Saints.

Decimal Time meeting

 

John H is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Decimal time 

Time: 60120.1 (Saturday 7:24 PDT)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/8111168381?pwd=wYCYSf16OE0uE4Ebu5XrJ2WwM0DKGb.1

Meeting ID: 811 116 8381

Passcode: decimal

Opinion Day

In the French Republican calendar, the penultimate day is Opinion Day, apparently being the only day allowed for free speech. Here is what they wrote about it: 

      The quintidi, fifth and last of the Sanculottides, will be called the Feast of Opinion. Here rises a tribunal of a new kind, both gay and tetrible. 

First decimal watch

Wedding Anniversary of Princess Elisa

Stardate One

So Star Trek: Picard has ended, and as I expected, gave us one, last stardate. What I did not expect was that the stardate would be ONE. Since this was the finale, and no spin-off has been announced, it’s impossible to know what this means for the future. It seems likely that there will be more adventures under Captain Seven of the Enterprise-G in the 25th century. But will the children of TNG continue using the same stardates as their parents, counting from 2323? Or will they use new stardates for the new century, perhaps counting from stardate One in 2501? I have a feeling we won’t have to wait long!

Space Time Zone

With NASA going back to the moon, Elon Musk going to Mars, and various other countries and corporations planning lunar and planetary trips and new space stations, International scientists and engineers have been debating how they will tell time in space, since there that are no days, months, and years, let alone time zones, and clocks move at slightly different speeds in other inertial reference frames.There is agreement that it is important for communication, cooperation, and safety that there be a single time standard  everyone, a Universal Time for the solar system. 

Happy Julian Day!

Happy Julian Day 

Morning Croissant

Morning Croissant is an independent publication launched in Fructidor CCXXX (August 2022 in vulgar time) by Carina Magyar. I provide cartomancy readings each day based on the French Republican calendar. I use different card decks each day as prompted by the previous day's reading, slowly building a Celtic Cross every 10-day décade.

Stardate composition

 Captain's log, stardate 78207.7.

I was able to reverse engineer the first Picard stardate, 78183.10, to within one milliyear. However, I'm not sure about the fractional part.  I'm just going to assume that it works the same way it did for Kirk and younger Picard, and that the integer, left of the decimal point, represents decimal milliyear, and the fraction, right of the decimal, represents the decimal time of day.

Formula for 2023 stardates

Captain's log, stardate 78207.68

Just convert from decimal Unix time to decimal milliyears.

SD = 1000*(U/S/L + D)

Stardate epoch

Captains log, stardate 78201.03. 

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the new stardate. The closest I could get was that, for 2023, it is based on when the episode aired in New York, at 3 am.

Stardates on this site

Captain's log, stardate 78199.692 

I’ve decided to use the new Picard system for stardates on this site. The exact algorithm isn’t given us, so I am matching stardates on the Today’s Stardate app, with the 1945 custom epoch, to make it more useful. Even then, his stardates are slightly different from my calculations, so I had to fudge a bit. 

Today’s Stardate for iOS

Captain’s log, 78194.44. 

I know of only one stardate app for Apple iOS, and that’s Todays Stardate by Rolando Pusineri. 

Calendar names

The French calendar has several names:

0:

Republican Calendar

Calendar of Reason 
French Revolutionary Calendar 

Romme calendar

New calendar

Jacobin calendar

Equinox calendar

Translation

 

How would the French calendar be translated into English? In The French Revolution: a History by Thomas Carlyle, published in 1837, he wrote, 

“one might say, in mixed English, Vintagearious, Fogarious, Frostarious: these are our three Autumn months...Snowous, Rainous, Windous make our Winter season…Buddal, Floweral, Meadowal, are our Spring season...(dor being Greek for gift) Reapidor, Heatidor, Fruitidor, are Republican Summer”

I think that a better translation for autumn would be: Vintageary, Fogary, Frostary. 

Another stardate

 

Captain’s log, stardate  76656.3. We have another stardate sighting. On the second episode of season three, there is a surveillance photo of a Romulan terrorist with a date-stamp of 70398.2812. That puts it around May 25, 2393, at 06:45.  

Picard’s Stardates

Captains log, stardate 76656.0. The showrunner of Star Trek: Picard, Michael Chabon, has said that the show would not be using stardates, for reasons. Last night I watched the first episode of season 3, and was surprised to hear a stardate! But I was not the stardate of the episode, but 43996.2, which meant that it was from  2366, the end of season 2 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was during the Battle of Wolf 359. I looked at the shirt I was wearing. It says, “Never Forget — Wolf 359, 43989.1”! Even if I didn’t remember, I could have known that it aired in mid-1994 from the stardate. 

Decimal Watch competition

Most assume that the French gave up on decimal time in year III (1795). However, I was reading some old newspapers, found, which I’ve translated. Notice that this is late in year IV (1796). I’ll also point out that some places used decimal time until 1800, after Napoleon’s Coup of Brumaire. 

I’ll also point out that 1 kg of gold is twice the size of an Olympic gold medal, but that’s only gold-played because gold is too expensive, about $60,000.00 per kilogram. 

---

JOURNAL OF PARIS.

(BY THE C.s RŒDERER AND CORANCEZ.)

Quartidi 14 MESSIDOR, the IVth year of the French Republic, one & indivisible.

Saturday, JULY 2, 1796 (old style.)

Revolutionary first names

I came across this article.  I had read that it was traditional to name children in the church after their name-day. The Catholic Church has a saint’s name or holiday for every day of the year. There was a decree that children should be named in the city hall according to the new calendar, as part of the campaign of secularism and anticlericalism. I’ve read many birth certificates, but have not noticed any Republican names. The law of 11 germinal year XI (April 1, 1803) stipulated that only the names of illustrious people and those used in the Catholic calendar could be received as first names in the civil status registers.  Names from the Republican calendar were thus prohibited. 

ISO 8601 hours

I have added ISO 8601 dates with decimal hours to the Conversions page. ISO 8601 is the international standard for representation of dates and times in electronic communication. The main part defines a descending order of units from most to least significant, from largest to smallest, that is, year-month-dateThour: minute: second, for example, 2023-03-09T06:05:00. 

Internet Archive

I looked this site up on the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. I don’t recall when I started out, but the oldest archive is from 2001, and the site was already pretty extensive. I started building websites in 1995, so I think that it started soon after. Beck then, I focused more on vanity projects, of which there were many. It seemed like every crank had they their own system of  “metric time.” I think that the publication online of solid information, especially on Wikipedia, made people realize that they weren’t original. I first started learning in the late 70s. 

This site has come a long way since then, but I think it has a good start. 

18 Ventôse year CCXXXI, pimpernel day @ 3^h 84^m 93^s PMT

Work days

One of the common objections to decimal time is that ten isn’t evenly divisible by three, so how are workers going to have three shifts a day, which currently makes for eight hours per shift? How will they have the same number of workdays with ten-day weeks?

kWh is not an SI or Metric Unit

Check out this article from an automotive website, 

Analog clock

You may have noticed that there is now an analog decimal clock on every page. I also made a full-page clock, perfect for a desk or nightstand. I wrote my first virtual, decimal, analog desk clock in the early 1980s in BASIC on an Atari 800. I remember that the computer’s internal clock was a 3-byte register that incremented 60 times per second, or in one “jiffy.” Three bytes meant that it would roll over every 3.238 days to 0. There was no battery, so it had to be reset every time you turned it on. The was also no Internet to set it automatically. It was as primitive as can be! 

Decimal meetings

In another century, an earlier version of this site would host web meetings of decimal time enthusiasts from around the Globe, at odd times like 51234.6, which would be 14:24 GMT. It was guaranteed that somebody was losing sleep! It was very primitive, text only, no audio or video. I created our own chatroom back then, with decimal timestamps, and each user would see their own favorite format, such as Republican, Julian Date, etc. Some invented their own. Now, we can use great online conferencing platforms, like Zoom.

So, what do you think?

Captain’s log, stardate 60009.3. 

Republican wall calendar

 

Ever wish you had the Republican calendar hanging on your wall? Well, you can!

Dates and times here

All Republican calendar dates on this site are according to The  Original Calendar, with years starting on the day of equinox, unless specified otherwise. I know that some prefer the revised calendar, which would be easier to use, but TOC was the only one actually used. 

Metric Time Unit

After reading the law naming the metric units, I noticed a pattern:

Twitter

My Twitter account is @JohnDHynes. I will be using the hashtag #DecimalTime. 

The following accounts tweet the Revolutionary date daily. The first two use the Republican calendar, and the others use the reformed calendar. 

@EreRepublicain

@SansCulotides

@gibus 

@FrenchCalendar

@Calendrier_Rep

@EspaceFrancais

For information about wall calendars, follow @JacobinCalendar. It will probably be a while before she has more available, but she’s said that before. 

Metric law

I found the law which established the metric time system.  

Updates

I have updated a number of pages, and created some new ones. You may have noticed the analog click on each page. 

Bissextile

Leap day is not the 29th day of February. It's the 24th. Rather, two days are counted as day 24. The Romans called the first day of the month Kalends, which is where we get the word "calendar." They counted down the days before Kalends, so the last day of February, the day before the Kalends of March, was numbered II. The 24th day was numbered VI. In leap years, there was an extra day VI in February, which was called bissextile. (Not bisexual!)

So those born on the last day of February in a leap year would cerebrate the last day every year, since it was counted as the 28th day, not 29. Likewise, those born on either the first or second 24 would celebrate on the 24th every year. No waiting four years!

MJD 60000.0

Watch the Modified Julian Date (MJD) roll over to a new myriaday, 60000.0. MJD is used to date star observations, and was the basis for stardates. One myriaday is 10,000 days, over 27 years. The next is in 2050.

Republican date & time

I updated the Calendars page to display the current Republican calendar date and decimal time, just as they were written in civil status registers during the Revolution, according to Paris Mean Time. 

I also added pages that calculate the first day of every year for the original equinox calendar and the revised calendar for 400 years and linked them from the calendars page. 

History of Time

I've been thinking about the history of time. 

Greek sundial

Sun Time

Ancient peoples used sundials to track the time of day. The Egyptians. divided the time between sunrise and sunset into 12 parts, or hours. The length of daily sunlight varied through the year, so the hours did, too, being longer in the summer and shorter in the winter. Nights were tracked by watching specific stars, and were also divided into 12 hours, making 24 total. Sometimes, dripping water was used to track time at night. 

Decimal time abandoned

Why was decimal time abandoned during the Revolution? C.A. Prieur (of the Côte-d'Or), read at the National Convention on Ventôse 11, year III (March 1, 1795):

Six years of decimal time

 

Although decimal time was required for public records for only six months from September 22, 1794, to April 7, 1795, some cities used it for as long as six years, until after Napoleon's coupe of 18 Brumaire. 

Midnight to one hour

This birth certificate from the town of Russey in Doubs says:

Aujourd'hui quinze Nivose troisième année de la République une et indivisible à cinq heures décimales…le Jour d’hier quatorze du courant à quatre vingt trois minutes trente trois secondes du matin…

History of the week

The 7-day week began in the Middle East. Babylonia kept track of the phases of the moon. Lunar calendar months begin with the first crescent. From there to the first half moon was 7 days, then 7 more days until the full moon, another 7 until the last half moon, then 7 more until the last crescent, followed by 1 or 2 intercalary days of no moon, which might have been added to the last week. This was apparently adopted by the Jews while in exile, as the Hebrew word for the 7th day, Sabbath, comes from Sabattu, meaning full moon, or literally, "middle rest" day in Babylonian.

The average month is 29.5 days, with no moon visible the last day or two, called "intercalary," so two consecutive months would look like this:

Princess Elisa’s Marriage Certificate

This is the marriage certificate for Napoleon’s sister, Princess Elisa, married in Marseille  

𝐿'𝒶𝓃 𝒞𝒾𝓃𝓆 𝒟𝑒 𝓁𝒶 𝑅𝑒́𝓅𝓊𝒷𝓁𝒾𝓆𝓊𝑒 𝒻𝓇𝒶𝓃𝒸𝒶𝒾𝓈𝑒 𝓊𝓃𝑒 𝑒𝓉 𝒾𝓃𝒹𝒾𝓋𝒾𝓈𝒾𝒷𝓁𝑒 𝐿𝑒 𝒟𝑜𝓊𝓏𝑒 𝒻𝓁𝑜𝓇𝑒𝒶𝓁 𝒶̀ 𝒮𝑒𝓅𝓉 𝒽𝑒𝓊𝓇𝑒𝓈 𝒞𝒾𝓃𝓆 𝒟𝑒́𝒸𝒾𝓂𝑒𝓈

The year five of the French Republic one and indivisible twelve Floreal at seven hours five décimes (7.5 h)

That’s May 1, 1797, at 6:00 pm. 

 

Hello

I see that I haven't posted here in 7 years. I also haven't renewed my domain names, but Google still keeps zombie blogs, so the BlogSpot address is working. There seems to be little interest in decimal time anymore, not that there was ever a lot. I think that may partially because one can get all the info from Wikipedia. Even there, I seem to be the only one updating the article.

Another reason for neglect here is most discussion has moved away from blogs to social media, like Twitter and Facebook. I noticed recently that somebody started a Decimal Time Facebook group, but nobody is posting there, either.

Another we didn't have 20 years ago was all the genealogical records online. I can now read all the records of births, deaths, and marriages for all of France. Whereas before there where very few examples of decimal time in use during the Revolution, now there are thousands. So, I need some place to write down my observations, even if nobody read them.

Sextidi 16 Pluviôse de la République française une et indivisible à 8 heures 87 minutes décimales