Originally the Babylonian clock split day and night each into 12 equal segments -- thus the length of an hour was different at night and day, and varied each day.
The concepts of minutes (small part) and seconds (even smaller part) is quite modern -- about a thousand years old, despite being broken into 60 (those Babylonians were quite influential!); once you do that you can continue into even smaller fractions but it was all pretty abstract.
Seconds only became interesting about 500 years ago when the clock technology could finally represent them, but they've only been useful for the last 250 years or so.
So having .1 s (not .1s!) be interesting 130 years ago is itself interesting, and reflects the state of technology (not science) of the time.