This is something that has always puzzled me and that is how did humanity come up with 24 units in a day and a night. Surely 10 units would have been more sensible? The other question is why did they start a new day in the middle of the night giving two night periods in a 24 hour unit day. Would it not have been easier to start with a new day in the morning.
Finally, the statement “I will meet you at 6 o’clock”. That is a bit hit and miss unless you add a suffix of a.m. or p.m. If they had given the day/night period of 10 units, which could then be divided in to 100 smaller units and that into another 100 smaller units, time could be expressed with either 1, 3 or 5 digits and there would be no confusion with day or night.
The day should start at an arbitrary daybreak at 0.00 and mid day would be 2.50, the old midnight would be 5.00 and through to the final deci unit before the next day of 9.99 excluding the other smaller deci units which would be very close to an existing second.
Wasn’t it devised by the ancient Persians, who had a counting system around base 60? 60 seconds, 60 minutes makes an hour, which happens to fit almost 24 times into a day. Then they took noon as the midway point and restart the count 12 hours from then.
Also, noon is pretty much the only point in time that you can determine without any reference - it’s simply the time where the sun is highest (give or take a few minutes), whereas daybreak changes every day - are you going to use equinox as your reference and start every day either at -x or x hours? But sure, the 24 thing seems a bit arbitrary, I totally agree.
You’ve got it backwards. You start with 12 hours, then you divide them into 60 minutes each. As the Romans they probably started out counting daylight hours only.
There was a documentary series on the history of numbers on BBC a few months ago. According to that, a major benefit of using a base 12 system is that it has more factors than base 10. You can easily divide a base 12 quantity by 2,3,4 and 6. In comparison base 10 can only be divided by 2 and 5.
Why do you suppose that? Until the metric system was invented, very few units of measure have been based on tens (and prior to the widespread use of Hindu-Arabic numerals, there wouldn’t have been much advantage to it).
If we used that system in London, an hour would be less than 40 minutes long in midwinter, but 83 minutes in summer. Bagsy taking my annual leave in summer!
This isn’t an issue in countries that have gone over to the 24-hour clock. In the UK we use a hybrid, where in spoken English we say “6 o’clock” but in written a lot of people (the majority? Maybe not, but the majority in business and when writing timetables etc. anyway) use the 24-hour clock. Much easier to comprehend.
So if I work a third of the day and the clock is 100 hours long, how many hours do I work? What about a sixth?
Explain to me again why 100 would be more “sensible”?
The 24-hour clock, not being hard to understand, is in wide use among Americans that need to use it, as well, such as nurses, pilots, hotel desk attendants, night watchmen, firefighters, and so on. Like many simple things, the only ones that don’t know it have no need for it.
I still cannot understand why 12 or 24 as we use the base 10 in counting and have done for the last 2000 years. Base 10 was obviously taken as the base as we have 5 digits on each hand. Have you ever watched a child count on their fingers.
I did not say 100 unit day / night but 10 units. 00 would be arbitrarily set at the present 6 a.m. but 1 deci unit before that would have been 9.99 the previous day.
If you can get your hands on the out-of-print The clock we live on at a library or used books store, it will provide all the logic and lack of it in how we keep time and why. One of my favorite “science fact” books of all time.
12 is a naturally occuring number as well, which is why we have 12 months. The are (roughly) 12 lunar cycles in a year. Once you start dividing the year into 12 segments (which most early calendars did) it also makes sense to divide the day into 12 segments. Then you do the same for the night.
If all you’re going to do is count on your fingers, base 10 is the only number system needed. But in modern time, mathematicians and computer geeks have used other base systems to work out complex problems. So too did ancient Persians, they had a priestly class that did nothing but study the sky, and made some innovative mathematical discoveries.
Also, consider, numbers like 12 and 36 are a very useful standard to base your measurements on – you can easily divide your measurements into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixteenths. Consider the old imperial length measurements, a yard can be divided into thirds as a foot can be divided into 12 inches. Yeah, you can take your modern metric lathe, and cut a meter of stock into 3 equal .33334 meter lengths. But could you have done that to build the Marie Rose in Henry VIII’s time? Maybe that’s why decimal time failed in Revolutionary France – to cumbersome to divide in your head.
The point is that we HAVEN’T been using base 10 in counting for 2000 years. That required the invention of 0 and place number notation. Many ancient cultures used bases such as 12 or 36. As has been said, this is better than base 10 for evenly dividing by a lot of numbers, which was important back then.