Wrinkles in Time: A Swiss watchmaker tries to reset the world’s clocks

On Oct. 23, 1998--an announcement that coincided with the 80th anniversary of Lenin's call for the Russian Revolution--the Swiss watchmaking company Swatch proposed a radical solution to the inconvenience of time. It branded this effort "Swatch Internet Time." Swatch Internet Time would, like its radical precursor, French Revolutionary Time, be decimal. However, rather than dividing the day into 10 hours, as was done during the French revolution, Swatch Internet Time divided the day into a thousand ".beats," each some 86.4 seconds long. Moreover, unlike French Revolutionary Time, which, like all time up to the 19th century, was synchronized city by city, Swatch Internet Time was emphatically global--it would apply equally to all locations on earth. Therein lay the novelty: 9 a.m. daylight saving time in Zurich, which is 5 p.m. in Sydney, would both be described by the same number: 333 beats.