Happy to share this here as the result of a beginner’s experimentation: I adapted the clock example on clock to accomodate another, decimal clock in the style that the French revolution envisioned in their strive to decimalise everything. In the end this project failed because clocks were made in Switzerland and therefore too expensive to refactor. If Elm would have been around at that time…
As a side effect, the minute and hour dials of the “normal” clock are now flowing instead of ticking every minute or hour. Normal analogue clocks only tick the seconds dial and sometimes the minutes dial, but not the hours dial.
Happy for feedback and encouragement and most of all more challenges (I’m looking for a mentor to guide me into the cool world of elm, but that will be the topic of another post).
I made an alternative clock in elm too! It’s a traditional Japanese clock that uses temporal time. Each day contains 6 day-hours and 6 night-hours of varying length depending on the date and the latitude.
Hey, you caught me on that one. It’s a hypothesis I have stumbled upon while reading about it somewhere (can’t find the reference), but I don’t think it’s actually true, that Swiss prices were the reason for non-adoption. Sure it would have been expensive to replace all clocks and sundials, but there were many fine French clockmakers. One of them (Breguet) fled to Switzerland where he would later invent the tourbillon. The biggest hurdle to adoption was probably that people don’t like change and there was no real benefit in counting time differently, except maybe in specialty fields like astronomics (Laplace). The way we count time today has been around for a long time (without timezones and mean times). Weight and money on the other hand was a big mess of confusing units, that benefited greatly from a standard that was imposed everywhere.
(I’m looking for a mentor to guide me into the cool world of elm, but that will be the topic of another post).