The French actually beat Swatch by a a couple centuries - during the French Revolution they spent about twenty years fooling around with metric/decimal time. Ten hours a day, 100 minutes an hour, and 100 seconds per minute (each second ended up about 14% shorter than a "normal" second). They real fun is in the calendar, with 12 months of 30 days each, and rules like "every tenth day is named after a mineral." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Deci... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Ten_...