The French Revolution proposed dividing the day into ten hours. It didn’t catch on, but an artist has created watches that respect that idea

Apparently it is a normal clock: its division by hours, its two hands (yes, we already know that if you are from Generation Z it is very possible that you do not know how to read time in this device, but let’s start from the fact that it seems to all of us that this looks like a traditional watch)… However, as soon as you look closely you will see that there is an extraordinary difference: the dial is divided into ten spaces instead of the usual twelve. In the name of Lewis Carroll, what the hell is this.

Ruth Evans, provoking. The clock is the work of artist Ruth Ewan and is part of a series of similar creations, called ‘We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be’, originally presented at Folkestone Artworks in 2011. It is a triennial of urban art works that, in its latest edition, includes 91 works by 52 artists. Ewan, a Scottish artist whose works always contain a social message, has retouched for the occasion some of the watches she created almost fifteen years ago for the contest.

How they work. The strange arrangement of the numbers is not an aesthetic decision, but rather we are looking at clocks that divide each day into ten hours, each hour into one hundred minutes and each minute into one hundred seconds. Midnight takes place at ten and noon at five. Currently, you already know: a day has 24 hours, each of which has 60 minutes, each with 60 seconds. From there we also use decimals: a second has ten tenths of a second, one hundred hundredths or one thousand thousandths. But Ewan’s is an absolutely rational division of time that is not capricious: it has a historical basis.

Making history. As we already said in its day, The ten-hour system was officially implemented in 1793 as part of the radical reforms spurred by the French Revolution. This decimal system was intended to simplify calculations and break with the past, aligning itself with other revolutionary aspects such as the republican calendar that divided the year into 12 identical months, of 30 days each and 10 days per week.

The use of decimal time was mandatory from the end of 1793 until April 1795, when its use was suspended after only 500 days, due to great popular resistance and the difficulty of adapting daily life and existing clocks to this new system. Some watchmakers attempted to create watches with dual numbering (decimal and traditional) to help the transition, but the change clashed with customs and business needs that depended on the traditional system.

What does it mean? Ewan’s intention with this watch is to show how changes in the organization of time can also symbolize profound social transformations, and proposes a new way of perceiving the world and questioning current systems. Let us remember that revolutionary France sought to introduce reason, equality and efficiency in all aspects of social life, including the measurement of time.

With something as simple as reminding us that time can be perceived very differently with a simple change in the artifacts with which we measure it, Ewan proposes a possible new social order, and an invitation to imagine alternative futures. The work questions the rigidity of capitalist chronological time, and that is why Ewan prepared and distributed some pamphlets that spoke of the utopian concept of time in the Revolution.

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