On October 23, 1998, Swatch changed the way we tell time. Or at least they tried to. The Swiss watch company, embracing all that was revolutionary and innovative about the early days of internet decided it was time we updated our outdated system for telling time. They revealed a coordinated campaign centered around throwing away the conventional methods for measuring time like hours and minutes and replacing them with their own units. CNN added the new time unit on their website, while some Ericsson cell phones had the option of displaying the time in Swatch’s new standard. And, of course, you could buy a Swatch watch that would this new unit.
It was called Swatch Beat Time, and it was based on the idea of breaking the day up into 1,000 equal parts, or “.beats” (the period in front of “beat” is the proper way to refer to a Swatch Beat Time .beat). When using the system, if someone asked you for the time, you would respond with “it’s 500 .beats” instead of “it’s noon.” When written, .beats were indicated by an “@“ symbol, so you would write to a friend that you would meet him at @789, or when you looked down at your Swatch .beat watch, instead of displaying 5:58, it would say @957. As there are 1,440 minutes in a given day, dividing it by just 1,000 units meant that one .beat was equal to around a minute and a half. Additionally, Swatch never gave instructions for divisions below the .beat level, so there was no way of measuring things that took seconds in the old hand measurements.
While Swatch Beat Time seems like a neat gimmick born of creative marketers trying to capitalize on the technological fervor of the 1990’s, counting time this way is actually a very old concept. During the French Revolution, the revolutionaries threw away everything that had come from the old regime, including time itself. They replaced the Gregorian Calendar with their own French Revolutionary Calendar, which was rooted around decimals. Each month had 30 days, divided into three ten-day weeks, called decades. They renamed all the months to coordinate with weather conditions typically experienced around that time, and renamed each day to the French language equivalents of First Day, Second Day, etc. Each day itself was divided into ten hours, and each hour into 100 minutes, meaning, like Swatch Beat Time, the day was divided a thousand ways.
While Swatch Beat Time was a borrowed concept, the intrepid Swiss built upon it. A key component of Swatch Beat Time was that there were no time zones. As it was a development of the internet age and was meant to be used globally, Swatch thought it useful that it be the same time around the globe no matter the timezone. @100 could be morning in some places and evening in others, but it would ensure no confusion among people communicating between any two places around the world. And while it seems gimmicky, Swatch was somewhat prescient of the effects the internet would have on regular communication. Having an internet standard time that ignored complicated time differences would make life easier for the increasing share the global population now regularly communicating across time zones. Next time you’re calling a friend across the country or across the globe, try setting a date for @500, and see what happens.
