This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarians. Today’s post was written by St John Karp.

Whenever I start talking about decimal time, people tend to roll their eyes at me and say, “Oh there goes St John again, talking about alternative timekeeping systems.” And they’re not wrong! I love the quirky, vaguely utopian attempts to make something better than what we have, even if those ideas failed somewhere in the execution. It’s probably why I also love constructed languages such as Esperanto and Toki Pona. Eagle-eyed readers might even remember that my last post on this blog, See You in the Chat Room, was also about alternative methods of telling the time, but today I want to talk about a new find I made in the Jost Bürgi Research Library at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY): an unheralded attempt at a decimal timekeeping system straight out of the United States in the 1960s.

But first let’s talk turkey. I’m not going to start with why we should have clocks with 10 hours on the dial. Why do we even have clocks with 12 hours on the dial? Whose bright idea was that? Don’t they know how much bother they would have saved everyone if they’d just started out with 10? Thankfully, “Time of Our Lives,” Sara J. Schechner’s invaluable book about sundials, tells us exactly what we need to know.

*An ancient Egyptian sundial, c. 1479-1425 B.C.E.*

The number 12 goes back all the way to the ancient Egyptians. There’s precious little that modern European culture gets from ancient Egypt. It’s not hard to look at classical Greek or Roman civilization and see the present reflected in it — our system of banking, our literature, and even our architecture. The culture of pharaonic Egypt was, however, largely lost over centuries of occupations and social changes. One of the most enduring legacies we get from the Egyptians is our 24-hour days. They began by dividing the night. The Egyptians recognized 36 time-telling stars, some 12 of which were visible on any given night, and so they divided the night into 12 periods based on the rising and setting of these stars. When they came to divide the day, they mirrored the number of nighttime hours. The first known Egyptian sundial dates from about 1500 B.C.E., but they probably had sundials as early as the third millennium B.C.E. They put 12 marks on their sundials and thus created the 24-hour day.

If the Egyptians ever had need of smaller units of time than an hour, they didn’t mention it. Credit for dividing the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds goes to the Mesopotamians, who must have been very insistent on punctuality if they were that obsessed with minutes and seconds. Jo Ellen Barnett in “Time’s Pendulum” writes that Mesopotamian mathematics did not support fractional quantities, so as a workaround the Mesopotamians favored using whole numbers that had a large number of even divisors. 60 is divisible by 10 smaller numbers without leaving a remainder, whereas 100 is only evenly divisible by seven other numbers. A third of an hour equal to 33 ⅓ minutes would have made the Mesopotamians cry.

According to Herodotus the Greeks inherited this system of hours and minutes from the Mesopotamians, and from Greece it’s a straight shot to the culture of modern Europe. So there you have it, from Egypt to Mesopotamia to Greece to the present day. Not that no one has ever thought about alternatives, however. The cauldron of ideas that was the French Revolution not only produced the metric system, it also produced an attempt at decimal timekeeping. Clocks had 10-hour dials, hours had 100 minutes, and minutes had 100 seconds. More recently, Swatch started producing digital watches in 1998 that divided the day into 1,000 “beats,” a system they called Internet Time. They do not make Internet Time watches anymore.

In between the French Revolution and the internet, however, there was an American proposal for a decimal time-keeping system. It originated with Noble H. Stibolt (1925–2003) of Matteson, Illinois, who in 1961 published a pamphlet called “Should ‘TIME’ Be Modernized?” In it, Stibolt proposed a decimal timekeeping system he called Metrictime that built upon the principles of the metric system. As with Revolutionary time, Metrictime divided the day into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. Stibolt did not leave it there, though. In 1969 he published a follow-up pamphlet in which he took his proposal one step further and made the case for a metric calendar. This calendar featured 10 days per week, nine weeks per season, four seasons per year, and five holidays to bring the total to 365 days per year. The days of the week were named Plutoday (Pluday), Neptuneday (Nepday), Uranusday (Urday), Saturnday (Saturday), Jupiterday (Jupday), Marsday (Marday), Earthday (Erthday), Venusday (Venday), and Sunday.

Stibolt worked out his decimal time and calendar systems to an astonishing level of detail. He even went as far as having a clockmaker in Massachusetts produce prototype wall clocks and longcase clocks with 10-hour dials. HSNY’s executive director Nicholas Manousos has weighed in on the construction of these, making the point that it’s not as simple as putting a 10-hour dial on a regular clock — the entire gear train needs to be re-engineered.

Ever since I found Stibolt’s pamphlet I was fascinated. I had to know more. Who was this man who had led a seemingly single-handed crusade, printing his own pamphlets, designing his own calendar and timekeeping system, and then vanished? As a librarian and archivist, I couldn’t leave well alone, I had to go digging for answers. I found some traces of the Stibolts online. They were a military family so public records helped supply some background, but there wasn’t much about how this had all come about or whether any more remnants of their work had survived into the present. I was almost ready to give up until I finally made contact with a Stibolt family member who helped me unravel the puzzle of the Stibolts’ relationship with horology.

Dan Stibolt is the son of Noble H. Stibolt, whose father was named Noble Stibolt (1892–1969). Dan credits his grandfather as being the driving force behind Metrictime. The elder Noble had been a traveling salesman, but leg injuries suffered at the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in World War I meant that he had trouble covering his old ground as a salesman. Instead, he went into law as an attorney. He recounted to his grandson that as a salesman he’d traveled across the country struggling to manage appointments and train schedules in different timezones, not to mention Daylight Savings casting the occasional spanner into the works. The elder Noble had been a Freemason and Dan speculates that his passion for decimal time may have been influenced by the Freemasons’ Enlightenment ideals just as the French had been inspired by the Enlightenment in their invention of the metric system during the Revolution. In 1964 the elder Noble, “a retired Chicago attorney,” was interviewed by local paper Berwyn Life.

Stibolt is dedicated to modernizing the time system. He points out that in a single day there are a dozen prevailing times in the United States, including military time, daylight, standard, AM, and PM, etc.

Stibolt says the only answer is to abandon the policy of dividing the world into 24 time zones and the day into 24 hours. Instead he advocates 10 time zones and a day divided in tenths, for a metric time system based on decimals. All of this country would be in one time zone. Certain areas could arise and retire earlier in summer but confusion with the clock would be ended. Timetables would be consistent, and A.M. and P.M. would be forgotten. There’d be no changing watches four times in a single transcontinental flight that may take only an hour or so.

Stibolt predicts a metric time system would save the world billions of dollars annually in wasted time and effort. Is he right? Only time can tell.

The Stibolts’ electric decimal
longcase clock

*Illustration from the Stibolts’ 1969 pamphlet: “Time… in metric style.”*

Dan writes that his grandfather presented his ideas to members of Congress and may even have been mentioned on The Today Show, though no evidence of these is known to survive. Noble passed away in 1969, and with him the primary impetus behind Metrictime appears to have evaporated. His son Noble H. allowed the 20-year trademark on Metrictime to expire in 1983. Likely one of the only copies of the Stibolts’ work to have survived is the copy of “Should Measure, Time and Calendar be Modernized?” that is held in HSNY’s library.

Today, time and calendar reform are regarded as slightly kooky undertakings. In 1975 the Australian evening current affairs program This Day Tonight aired an April Fool’s hoax suggesting that Australia would convert to metric time, under which hours would be called decidays, minutes would be centidays, and seconds would be millidays. In the television program Veep (2012–2019) one of the more loathsome characters bases a farcical political campaign on abolishing daylight saving time.

It’s tempting to want to reform a system that came about by chance. No one designed it, no one asked for it, and no individual’s hand is discernible in its creation. It just sort of happened. But then consider how well this happy accident has worked for 4,000 years. If it really were that bad, surely we would have come up with an improvement by now. The fact that it just works means that maybe we lucked into the best of all worlds. Even so, the work of people like Noble and Noble H. Stibolt is nevertheless astonishing for its creativity, passion, and optimism for a different way of doing things, and that’s why I reserve the right to bore you with decimal timekeeping at parties. To me, the impractical, the strange, and the unlikely ideals of these systems remain fascinating.