In 1897, the Commission de décimalisation du temps was created by the French Bureau of Longitude, with the mathematician Henri Poincaré as secretary. James Clerk Maxwell and Elihu Thomson (through the British Association for the Advancement of Science, or BAAS) introduced the Centimetre gram second system of units in 1874 to derive electric and magnetic metric units, following the recommendation of Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1832. In the 19th century, Joseph Charles François de Rey-Pailhade endorsed Lagrange’s proposal of using centijours, but abbreviated cé, and divided into 10 decicés, 100 centicés, 1,000 millicés, and 10,000 dimicés. A kè is about 14.4 minutes, or 14 minutes 24 seconds. One kè was usually defined as 1⁄ 100 of a day until 1628, though there were short periods before then where days had 96, 108 or 120 kè.

In China, during the Song Dynasty, a day was divided into smaller units, called kè ( 刻). Such alternative units did not gain any notable acceptance. Decimal time of day had been introduced in France two years earlier, but mandatory use was suspended at the same time the metric system was inaugurated, and did not follow the metric pattern of a base unit and prefixed units.īase units equivalent to decimal divisions of the day, such as 1/10, 1/100, 1/1,000, or 1/100,000 day, or other divisions of the day, such as 1/20 or 1/40 day, have also been proposed, with various names. The final system, as introduced in 1795, included units for length, area, dry volume, liquid capacity, weight or mass, and currency, but not time. On March 28, 1794, the commission's president, Joseph Louis Lagrange, proposed using the day (French jour) as the base unit of time, with divisions déci-jour and centi-jour, and suggested representing 4 déci-jours and 5 centi-jours as '4,5', '4/5', or just '45'. The commission considered whether they could replace the traditional definition of the second with a more rational one. The commission rejected the pendulum definition the following year because it would make the definition of the metre depend on the second, which was felt to be an arbitrary unit that might soon be replaced, rather than a fundamental natural unit, and also because the period of a pendulum was found to vary slightly from place to place. A Commission of Weights and Measures was formed within the French Academy of Sciences to develop the system. In 1790, French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord proposed that the fundamental unit of length for the metric system should be the length of a pendulum with a one-second period. Angular measure also uses sexagesimal units there, it is the degree that is subdivided into minutes and seconds, while in time, it is the hour. The word 'minute' comes from the Latin pars minuta prima, meaning 'first small part', and 'second' from pars minuta secunda or 'second small part'.

This system divides a base unit into sixty minutes, each minute into sixty seconds, and each second into sixty tierces.

The second derives its name from the sexagesimal system, which originated with the Sumerians and Babylonians. Metric time is a measure of time intervals, while decimal time is a means of recording time of day. Other units of time – minute, hour, and day – are accepted for use with SI, but are not part of it. The modern SI system defines the second as the base unit of time, and forms multiples and submultiples with metric prefixes such as kiloseconds and milliseconds. Metric time is the measure of time intervals using the metric system.

12 minutes timer