This decimal clock was made by Pierre Daniel Destigny in Rouen, France, between 1798 and 1805. | DeFacto, Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0 Everybody knows that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes ...

About face The Clockwork Conspiracy conjures up a world where decimal time becomes reality which is not as mad as it seems: this decimal clock was made by Pierre Daniel Destigny c. 1798–1805. (CC ...

Though Marie Antoinette would be hard-pressed to care, the French Revolution of 1789 set its sights on more than simply toppling the monarchy. Revolutionaries sought to break the nation free from its ...

Henri Poincaré was the brilliant mind who gave us the beginnings of chaos theory and Poincaré conjecture. He was also the doggedly persistent nut who was the last member of resistance to a twenty-four ...

For thousands of years, we’ve divided days into 24 hours, hours into 60 minutes, and minutes into 60 seconds. But why do we have to do that? Here’s the story of the one gloriously failed attempt to ...

Humans historically have worked well with decimal numbering systems. This is probably due to the fact most of us have ten fingers, which make counting in base ten easy. Yet humanity seems to doggedly ...

Australia gave up years ago on the prehistoric systems of gallons, miles and pounds. But like the rest of the world, we cling like apes to hours, minutes and seconds. What fundamental law of the ...