Original photo by Grzegorz Czapski/ Alamy Stock Photo
It probably isn’t 10:10 as you’re reading this, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it is if you just watched an ad for a clock or watch. Timepieces are almost always set to that exact time in advertisements, and as with most aspects of advertising, this choice isn’t arbitrary.
The time 10:10 is considered aesthetically pleasing because it looks symmetrical on the face of analog watches and clocks, something anyone who prefers things to be neat and tidy will appreciate. It also helps that this position allows the company’s logo to not only be visible but perfectly framed by the hands pointing to 10 and 2. And this isn’t done just some of the time: In 2008, for example, The New York Times found that 97 of the 100 bestselling watches on Amazon were set to 10:10 in their pictures.
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It's a factThey’re so accurate, in fact, that some will gain or lose only a second of time over the course of tens of millions of years.
This ubiquitous hand placement has another, more subtle advantage: It looks like a smiley face. A 2017 study on the subject published in Frontiers in Psychology found watches set to 10:10 “showed a significant positive effect on the emotion of the observer and the intention to buy.” Those set to 8:20, which looks more like a frown and was the standard setting in the 1920s and ’30s, had no such effect. Like a lot of advertising tricks, it’s not evident to most consumers — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t working.
Numbers Don't Lie
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“O’clock” is a contraction of “______.”
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“O’clock” is a contraction of “of the clock.”
France experimented with 10-hour days during the French Revolution.
Humans have been keeping time according to the sexagesimal (based on 60) system for at least 4,000 years, starting when the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians introduced the concept. The system is based around the number 12 — hence, there are 12 months in a year, 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day.
Not everyone was a fan of this system, however. As part of the sweeping changes introduced during the French Revolution, the country experimented with decimal time, which is based around the number 10. In the system, a minute is 100 seconds, an hour is 100 minutes, a day is 10 hours, and a week is 10 days.
Decimal time was formally adopted in 1793 but never truly caught on. Everyone already had working duodecimal clocks, the new 10-day week interrupted religious ceremonies due to there no longer being Sundays, and tracking leap years wouldn’t have worked properly. France said au revoir to decimal time when it was officially suspended on April 7, 1795.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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