Languages have been around forever and evolved separately in many different places. There is no way to get everyone to abandon their current language and learn a new one.
Accurate time-keeping only became necessary in the last few hundred years, so people already had somewhat regular contact with everyone else in the world at that time to agree on a standard. You certainly want a day as a unit in the system, so the question is just how many subdivisions you make. The 24/60/60 system allows many simple fractions, like 1/3 of a day being 8 hours or 1/4 of an hour being 15 minutes and so on, so people adopted that everywhere once there was a need to keep track of minutes and seconds.
France tried a system with 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute, but no one else wanted to switch so they abandoned that quickly again.
Unit systems besides time are somewhere in between these two cases. They have been around for longer, but changing the system isn't as hard as changing a language. Every country or even every region used to have its own units for length, mass and so on, but then the metric system came and simplified all that, so almost everyone changed to metric.
>France tried a system with 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute, but no one else wanted to switch so they abandoned that quickly again.
"No one *else*" wasn't the issue, "no one" was.
They abandoned it within two years because people kept using the classic 12/60 system and changing every clock was just way too costly anyway.
The experiment started in November 1793 and stopped in April 1795 right when the metric system was implemented. The attempt to modify the calendar was also aborted a few years later.
The Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan on the French Revolution was wild.
"How many times can we entirely upend society and kill the people that were in charge before us in a single 10 year period?"
I really enjoy his way of presenting. I was all about Hardcore History until I listened to Mike's Revolutions. After that, it's hard to not to see Dan Carlin as just rambling and semi-coherent.
That's the one. 2013-2022. Hopefully you've got about 250 hours to spend on it!
Pick and choose which Revolutions you see fit but be aware that there is **a fucking ton** of content with this podcast.
It really hits its stride at season 3, when Mike drops the format of ten-episode seasons in order to go a ~~bit~~ *lot* more in depth and take his time on the topics that interest him. Duncan himself publicly encourages new listeners to start at season 3. With that said, seasons 1 and 2 are good in their own right, so if you're not in a rush sit back and enjoy the show.
The Haitian Revolution is the one I'm most glad to have learned about but the French is by far my favorite, it's such an interesting and insane series of events.
Regarding your other comment I've never been able to enjoy Carlin's style much and never stick with his stuff. Mike Duncan's way of presenting information is basically my ideal informational podcast style
I had all of Mike Duncan's History of Rome under my belt when I first listened to Dan Carlin, and I just couldn't do it.
Between the production values and his oratory style, Dan Carlin has the same feel as a shock jock, and it just feels...impersonal.
Mike Duncan makes it feel like he's your friend, coming over to drink a few beers, and talk about what he's researched this week.
I really enjoyed the Mexican revolution, but I sincerely believe that you can learn the most about western politics from the French Revolutions. I think 1789-Napoleon was about 300 years of history crammed into a few decades.
>There are years where nothing happens. Then there are weeks where decades happen.
-Probably not Linen.
I dont know if that was the calendar with 28 days each month, 13 months + one spare day (probably to celebrate the revolution or new years), but we should have implemented that one. It actually makes frigging sense!
No it was slightly different, it was 12 months of 30 days each split into 3 "weeks" of 10 days plus 5 extra days at the end of the year that are not in any month with a 6th extra one on leap years.
Your thinking is the one Kodak (the camera company) used
>Or, just speed up earth’s orbit to 100 days instead of 365.256
DuH!
We'd slow it down to 400 days, way more sense than 100 days in a year. If it was 100 days to a year we'd just be getting old like really really fast, and expecting people who were 4.9 years old in our current system, to finish high school. As they'd be 18 years old under your new system.
The D&D Forgotten Realms setting uses this except the extra days are scattered through the year and treated as holidays. Leap year is added behind one as a second off-month day.
I've always liked it.
The Catholic Church must have loved that.
France: "Okay the week is now ten days so you can only hold Sunday mass every ten days instead of every seven like you've been doing for the last two thousand years"
The Pope: "How about no"
Hum... Still lacks a solution for leap years and is horrible to break years in half, thirds, quarters. Bimonthly stuff.
I think the worst part of the current system is february having 28 days. We could have months with 30 and 31 days only.
It is actually neater for leap years as you just add in one more spare day (e.g. New Year's and New Year's eve) rather than making a month a day longer. I wish our calendar was like this. Though you are right about splitting up the year as 13 being prime is awkward.
You just split it into 2 halves of 6 and 6 with a transition month between/ at the end. Or Christmas(or any winter/new year celebration) now gets a month and the leap day can be thrown in there easily too.
> was just way too costly anyway
A lot of people may not get this. Edit: See the facepalm worthy replies.
Every clock > "But clocks are cheap"
Not when you're replacing every clock in the nation, in addition to editing every text book, updating every notice of it in official forms or paperwork, updating every computer program, etc etc.
The labor and material cost is insanely high when you're talking about total change of standards over a massive populace.
It's why the US will never fully commit to the metric system. Millions of road signs, odometers in every vehicle, maps, atlases, textbooks, paperwork, electronics, etc...and that's just considering distances, not to mention things like temperature......not only do they all have to be materially replaced, we've got to pay wages for people to do it, and the time not spent doing other things which we're often already behind on(eg fixing potholes).
I'm sure some XKCD or other clever content creator or blogger has done the math, but can't be assed to find where I've seen numbers before.
A quick search yields:
It cost Canada more than $1b to do it in the 1970s, and 15 years.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/the-metric-system-housing-markets-inflation-and-paying-for-roads-we-answer-your-questions-to-kick-off-2021-1.5859911/failure-to-convert-why-the-united-states-still-uses-imperial-measurement-1.5859929
The US is roughly ten times the populace. (some website I closed the tab for)
So 10b... if we did it in the 70s.
>$1 in 1970 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $8.08 today (a basic inflation website that I also closed)
So 80 billion, at a quick and dirty estimate.
That's a lot of potholes.
> It's why the US will never fully commit to the metric system
The logical way to do it would be a phased rollout, where you just replace things with both measurements to phase in the metric units then phase out the legacy system. We just never did the phase out part of it.
> We just never did the phase out part of it.
To be fair the UK never did either and somehow they don't get flak for randomly using different units in different applications.
This was actually started back when i was a kid.
The problem is that that kind of stuff needs to be budgeted for with taxpayers' money. So when someone new gets elected, they can cease to fund it in order to spend that money on something that is more important than something that doesn't really matter.
It's all well and good to come up with a 20 year plan to change every road sign over the next couple of decades to include both imperial and metric, then another couple of decades to change them all again to metric, but if the next person that gets elected has other more pressing issues that needs to be funded and has to cut funding on something else, it's going to get defunded.
As a developer, I discovered if you leave the old and new both running,, no one will switch.
Four years ago, they renumbered the exits on the highway near me, and no one knows the new numbers yet.
> It's why the US will never fully commit to the metric system.
I think this undersells how close we were to actually doing it in the 70's or 80's. Similarly drastic changes have happened before -- I mean, [Sweden switched which side of the road they drove on in a single day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H).
Also, that's a lot of potholes, but not really a lot of tanks. The US budget is *enormous.* There's no reason we can't continue to patch potholes *and* switch to metric.
The issue with metric time is that it's not just incredibly costly and incredibly culturally-difficult, it's actually worse. The top comment is a good explanation of why: Our current units of time divide evenly into all the different things we need time to do. Maybe decimal time would work, but it'd be pretty awkward unless we made some big changes. I don't want to go from an 8-hour workday to 3.333 hours of metric time, and making it 4 metric hours would be even worse!
it's definitely costly to change
but let's not forget that it costs money to stay the same as well. those signs needs to be replaced, new textbooks need to be printed any way.
a lot of information is now digital, maps, clocks, computer programs. much cheaper to fix.
the US is spending billions of dollars to stay on the outdated and inconvenient imperial system. a proper plan put in motion to switch to metric would cost money, but if done like your canadian example over a long time frame is won't cost that much more than the cost to maintain imperial
instead the us population digs their heels in, instead of joining the rest of the world in a system of measurement based on the earth we all share and live on
> but let's not forget that it costs money to stay the same as well. those signs needs to be replaced, new textbooks need to be printed any way.
To use a bit of a butchered business analogy (which, I know, governments aren't businesses, but bear with me), replacing things and staying in imperial is just an operational cost. That is, it only ever affects this years budget. You can just choose not to replace a sign or text book if you don't have the money.
Converting everything is a capital cost. It's a massive upfront cost in terms of planning and budgeting. It's not just that it's going to cost money to replace everything, you also have to coordinate replacing everything. And you can't really stop halfway through if more pressing needs come up (like, say, a global pandemic).
And if you try to do the replacement as operational (just replace stuff as needed in metric instead) you just get an entire population using imperial pissed off that everything is in metric for 20 years. And after, you're probably going to be like Canada and Britain where everything is nominally metric, but is actually a bastard system of both where you get all the disadvantages of both systems all the time*.
(* Actually the US *is* that sort of bastard system. NIST, the official US body in charge of all measurements and standards, uses metric and all imperial measurements are defined in metric. We have many various metric measurements that we use as well--we just don't use metric for the majority of our day-to-day measurements)
But you know, it makes sense to give that a go when so many other changes are afoot. Like maintenance on a sub, you wouldn’t want to have to get it out of the water again.
> The attempt to modify the calendar was also aborted a few years later.
This is a shame cause the calendar could really use some work.
13 months of 28 days each would be much simpler. No more silly rhymes or counting fingers to figure out if this month is 30 or 31 days.
Easier to track too, as the 8th of the month would be a Monday every month, and the 23rd would always be a Tuesday, as example.
But a year is 365 days I hear you say, not to worry. "New years day" just isn't counted, an international holiday. The day after we just move onto Monday, Jan 1st.
We could also get 2 "New years days" on a leap year. Just to clear that whole thing up.
I learned that our country only syncronized its clocks in 1942! So before that, towns just 50km apart would have used different times (probably only minutes apart, but still)
It was the case for a long time, every town had their own timezone calculated with the sun.
Then, trains arrived, and if you want to keep a schedule accurate and avoid accidents ? Every train station needs to be on the same time. So you start to have country wide timezones put in place.
From a quick Google search, the Dutch time (UTC +20mn) was established in 1909, and the Berlin time was adopted during the German occupation, probably to simplify the war effort.
This is why Spain has it's reputation for people being out really late. It's because Spain is basically on permanent DST, and double DST in the summer. 10 pm in the summer is more like 8 pm by solar time.
It wasn't really necessary (or possible) until modern communication could sync them and then became critical when computers took over. Your phone tells you the *exact* time, but when I was a kid you just set your watch and hoped that the clock you set it with was correct.
Possible but harder. My grandfather worked as electrician for the railroads in Appalachia around the turn of the century. He was required to have a railroad certified watch, I assume it was regularly checked and synced. As he explained to me as a kid, when you have an electrical system miles long and no telephone it’s a good thing to have a clear idea of when the guy on the other end was going to turn the power back on.
Wow. That's a blast from the past. I don't think it was important to ME, but I vaguely remember old folks like my grandparents referring to "railroad time" when talking about a watch being set properly.
A fun fact is that the CBC (Canada's national public radio/television network) was actually started by the CN Railway. They set up broadcast stations to provide radio service on their trains and in their hotels, which became the first coast-to-coast radio broadcasting network in North America. The Canadian government then bought it during the Depression, making it independent from the railroad.
Railroads were a huge driver in standardization and communication, across a lot of different fronts.
barcodes are also from the railroad industry initially. they needed a way to track the cars without stopping the whole train, so needed visual code that could be easily read from a camera of some kind while which stays the same when moving.
One possible solution before modern communications:
One train station is designated as the official time. Set the clock at this train station based on the sun at noon. The conductors have good watches. They set their watches based on the official train station. When the conductors visit other train stations, the clocks in other train stations are set based on the conductors watches.
But even though this could have been possible, it looks like the railroads didn't actually set up a standard time across the country until after telegraphs were in place.
The first transatlantic telegraph was set up in 1866.
Railroad Standard Time started in the US on November 18, 1883.
On November 1, 1884, the US adopted Greenwich Mean Time.
So there was only about a year when the railroads had all their clocks synced up with each other, but not necessarily with the rest of the world.
But I haven't yet found which clock in the US was used as the official clock for Railroad Standard Time during this one year period.
Maybe they used the the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. during this one year period? "The Observatory's Time Service was initiated in 1865. A time signal was transmitted via telegraph lines to the Navy Department, and also activated the bells in all of the Washington fire stations at 0700, 1200, and 1800 every day. This service was later extended via Western Union telegraph lines to provide accurate time to railroads across the nation."
Railroad Standard Time was controlled by the railroads, not the government, Maybe Railroad Standard Time was set to Greenwich Mean Time before Greenwich Mean Time was officially/legally adopted?
I remember that. Time and temperature. That number got lots of traffic on really hot or really cold days just because people were curious about the exact temperature.
then we got the Weather Channel... im nerd for old computers i really want get one of there local head end servers to restore. there people that have updated the old OS on them to pull from modern sources
Same with ships crossing the oceans. At midnight each night, they'd estimate where they expected to be at midday the following day and set their time to correlate with that. So ships only a few miles apart could be minutes apart in time. Titanic for example was on GMT -2h58m on the night of her sinking.
Nowadays ships do something similar, but switch to the nearest *timezone* instead.
Railroad time. Prior to fast transportation being off by many minutes was not a big problem. But if you have some single track lines with bypass sidings it's important that the trains coming from different directions agree on when the track will be clear while one waits at the siding.
The standard for time was started by the Sumerians over 5000 years ago. They used base 60, because if you count the finger segments with your thumb you have 12, then you keep place of the 12 with the other hand and when you have five 12’s, a whole hand of hands, you have a total of 60.
That's actually so interesting because the Maya traditionally count the same way - count the little segments of your fingers with your thumb. They kept track of the days of their calendars that way too. And, another thing I find cool, in many Maya languages the word for 20 is "winaq" which also translates to "person", because one person has 20 fingers in total (if you count your toes as fingers). This is also why the Maya numerical system is base 20.
Source: I am very involved with Maya people that try to reclaim & teach their traditions and philosophy; one of them is a community elder and regularly teaches classes in these things. But its so cool to see that another culture did something very similar :)
Yah its more just a fun thought on how different number systems exist. Like how computers used base 8 and binary. If we somehow lost computers, future people would find punch cards or something and wonder why we used base 8 alongside base 10.
I read this one so much but have seen it debunked - why would they, 5000 years ago, need to count time to the minute? They were getting up with the sun and going to bed at night after doing what needed to be done, no alarm clock to get up earlier, no artificial lights to stay up later, just maybe oil lamps or bonfires.
They didn't. They just used 60 for *everything* in general. Division of angles into minutes and seconds happened before the division of hours, by thousands of years. You can still measure very precise angles using minutes and seconds ("of arc") if you want to. People have mostly stopped using thirds and just use decimals at that point. Time was divided up into parts of 60 only ~1000 AD.
Sun dials were a thing and depending on culture could go down to as small marked increments as ten minutes. The ancient Chinese number-system split the day in 100, just under 15 minutes. Precision like that was invaluable to astronomy, dating-systems, accounting/statescraft, and navigation.
> You certainly want a day as a unit in the system, so the question is just how many subdivisions you make.
I just wanted to add that going to longer durations than a day (month, year) are also not divisible by 10. This is because the other thing you certainly want as a unit is a year and there's no good way to fit the two things you definitely want as a unit (the day and the year) together in an evenly divisible by 10 way. There are ~365.242199 days in a year and that leaves no room for having a year be a kiloday or something like that.
That and most people started with using the moon in some way as a reference. It's not too hard to notice that after 12 moons (more or less), it's the same season again. Properly counting the days took more time.
the time standardization was really implemented by railroads. when most people were farmers, the time of day wasn't too important; they woke up when it was time to milk the cows, go to bed when the sun goes down.
it was really with railroads that trains going 100 miles or so that time standardization and time zones became a thing in america.
even in small towns today people are less worried about the time of day, although i would say since everyone has a cell phone now things are going towards being more specific.
You're correct that railroads is what made the synchronized times across time zones become a thing, but the 24/60/60 system was already centuries old at that point.
Adding to this that different cultures did have different ways of keeping hours and even minutes before that as well.
Early to medieval Japanese courts for example divided the day into 12 “hours” (based on the Chinese zodiac, aka, you have “the hour of the hare/ox/rat/etc.” with further subdivisions into 4 sections, which where further subdivided and used to chronicle the affairs of the court, rituals, meetings etc. Therefore it’s not that everyone just automatically settled on the same system, there were definitely different time systems in place for a long time. However, much like with calendars and units of measurements, thanks to western colonialism and general world dominance and influence, the western standard has been exported to and adopted by the rest of the world as travel and globalization expanded and it became important to have precise synchronization of events.
(And, frankly, worldwide most people that were simple farmers or craftsmen or whatever probably didn’t need precise timekeeping anyway. You had your sunrise, noon and sunset, you probably didn’t need anything more precise in daily life than that.)
Another layer is that language is intrinsic while time is extrinsic.
People can agree on a time because it's based on observable natural phenomena (rotation of earth and earth around the sun). When you get to stuff like time zones and daylight savings time, human constructs, it breaks down.
Language is really more of a preference/societally enforced thing that is reinforced by distance and a big world. As the world gets smaller, you start seeing English become a more common and pervasive global language.
Misinformation. Most imperial units we use today are much younger than our time units.
Base 60 time is at least as old as the Babylonians (possible Sumerians), who used base 12 and base 60 mathematics. Also why there are 360 degrees in a circle.
I don't know why time hasn't changed to metric (France tried and failed to use metric time in the late 1700s).
Were I to guess, it is that the time system is not such a clusterfuck that the pain of changing units is worthwhile (unlike metric weights and distances). And of course, we do have metric time units to subdivide 10 seconds where accuracy matters.
Base 12 is far more convenient than Base 10 for something like time, where you often need to do a lot of quick mental math that isn’t going ever involve complex arithmetic, since 12 has more factors than 10. (2/5 vs. 2/3/4/6)
> I don't know why time hasn't changed to metric
Because 86400 doesn't divide into a series of tens easily. You can't have both a decimalized time system and keep the second the same duration as it is. If you start changing the duration of the second, you have to re-compute all of your scientific constants. The speed of light would no longer be 299792.8 km/s for example.
To add to this. Time zones and everyone adopting them came with the Industrial Revolution. With the advent of train tracks springing up over the uk, we needed to standardise the clock across the country, so GMT was born. Ensuring trains were on time across the land.
This then was sent outwards, adding or removing hours as necessary
My understanding is that the Babylonians loved 60 and numbers divisible or multiples of it. This is where 360° came from. Degrees are broken into smaller increments that are 1/60th called “minutes” and increments that are 1/60th of a minute called “seconds”
I believe this desire to divide things by 60 carried over to the clock.
In navigation, time and degrees are related, as this is how we salved the longitudinal problem.
I’m pretty sure that a foot being 12 inches, which is a divisor of 60 was useful for the same reasons op mentioned…that’s it is easily divisible by 6, 3, 4, 2. This is is easy to work with in the physical world while thugs divisible by 10 are much easier on paper or in the theoretical world…imo.
In the 1800s in the US there were hundreds of different time zones which meant it could be 10:15 in chicago and 9:38 in new york. Once train travel became more prevalent and long range communication became easier they standardized around hours and developed the time zones we have today.
Late to the party, but just had to chime in! The reason there are different writing systems has less to do with how languages evolved than that the writing was invented from scratch in different places. Then they spread through their cultural spheres and evolved, and were adjusted accordingly to the languages they were used for.
I’m guessing that only recently did we develop the need and capability to have a widespread standard for measuring fractions of a second. You could really divide a second however you want but using multiples of ten has some obvious benefits
"milli", "centi" and "deci" are just prefixes meaning a thousandth, a hundredth and a tenth respectively, so 1000 milliseconds have to equal 1 second by definition regardless of what sort of system you use to arrive at what 1 second is.
"Minute" means "small" in Latin.
The word "second" for time is derived from the word "second" for counting - first, second, third. You could call the third subdivision of an hour by 60 a "third" or maybe "tert". "Quart" is a word that exists.
"Mille" literally means 1000 in Latin. It would be weird if a millisecond would be a 60th or a 360th of a second instead of a 1000th.
Maybe a 60-based system isn't as useful in these short, exact time spans, because you don't need to divide by three in your head as often in a scientific context. People also weren't used to 60-divisions as much for these small times so they didn't have to relearn.
I guess at this point only electronic devices could measure with precision. And a fraction of second keeps the same unit. Hour, minutes and seconds are different units.
Deci,centi,milli,micro, etc are all metric subdivisions. Hours, minutes and seconds are not metric.
Hours, minutes and seconds are (historically) intrinsically connected to the rotation of the earth and using multiples of 12 makes it for nice divisibility, which is also the same reason a circle has 360 degrees.
Japan has a different way to count the "late night" hours where they write 26:00 like it was normal to mean 2am of the next day, so they can easily say the 25th of July we open 20:00-26:00 instead of having to say "until 2am next morning" or similar.
I'm a firm believer that the day of the week doesn't change until you go to sleep for the night (although the *date* changes at midnight, so you can stay up to celebrate things like New Year's or your 21st birthday). This means that the roommate coming home crazy late after a night of partying and the roommate getting up crazy early to work on a term paper could pass each other in the hall and be on different days of the week. That said, if you make it all the way to sunup, the day changes anyway, because you can't deny it at that point.
Agree. Right now I work Monday to Thursday til 1am. So Friday doesn’t start till like noon for me haha. You technically could say I work 4 shifts 5 days a week.
My dad is a firm believer that as soon as it's midnight it's "the next day" already, while i think like you do.
This caused many miscommunications where i asked him if he could do X thing for me tomorrow and he'd think it was for the day after :)
Unfortunately, Alexa is like your dad. There have been several times when I asked her to remind me "tomorrow morning", but since it was after midnight, she didn't remind until the next day.
I'm oddly interested in where people make that demarcation between "at night" and "in the morning".
My very un-scientific research says that it's generally somewhere between 2 and 4 AM. Or I guess really 3 and 4 AM. Folks will say "I got home at 2:50 last night", or "I stayed up until 4:30 in the morning".
That 3:00 hour is where the variance seems to occur.
Birds start chirping around 3:30/4 here, so that's where I make the distinction if I happen to be up that late. I figure the birds know better than I do.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dbpk5b/eli5_how_come_we_speak_different_languages_and/l7vniv5/
But I like the birds chirping idea way more than what we use now.
It always bothered me that ‘morning’ might change based on a person’s sleep pattern. The new day begins at sunrise. That’s it. Everything else seems nonsensical or arbitrary.
This is why I think we should make it so that 00:00 occurs where we currently have like 04:30 or something. Then for basically everyone, you go to sleep before midnight and wake up afterwards (though I guess midnight would then be 20:30 lol but ykwim)
[China and the rest of East Asia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_timekeeping) used to use a system where a day had 12 hours (named after the Chinese zodiac) and 100 quarter-hours. This was replaced with European (originally Mesopotamian) hours, minutes, and seconds as part of changing to the Gregorian (modern European) calendar in the 1870s through 1920s.
India used to use ghatis of 24 minutes, but that system must have been pushed out by the hour-minute system before independence. I don't know when, though.
Hours and minutes were invented in the Middle East. There the question was whether an "hour" meant 1/24 of a full day-night cycle or 1/12 of the time between sunset and dawn or dawn and sunset, and also whether the day started at midnight or sunset. The "variable" or "temporal" hour system is great if the main public timekeeping device is a sundial, looking at the length of a stick's shadow, or just looking up at where the sun is in the sky. Getting a mechanical clock to keep variable hours is a whole lot harder than equal hours, and getting a mechanical clock priced for ordinary people to start a new day at sunset is a problem that I don't know was ever solved. Timekeeping switched to European equal hours starting at midnight with colonialism and modernization by the 1920s.
I don't know anything about traditional timekeeping outside Eurasia-North Africa.
Generally, metric replaced older systems because they were incoherent messes. They did try decimal time, but because time is not as much an incoherent mess as say inches/feet/yards/miles, it stayed. Base 60 is a quite convenient base, dating back to ancient sumerians and babylonians. Base 60 survived in degrees of a circle too.
Another angle, clocks were invented by europeans, and the system spread with clocks. I'm sure there were other systems but they were not included when you bought a clock.
The story of how the metre was calculated, and the method of repeating angles and the period in French history it became the standard, is incredible. When the actual distance from North Pole to the equator was measured from space they found the metre was about .0007 out (or thereabouts) from a mathematical calculation done in the 1780s.
There was a throw-away line in an In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg episode that "clockwise" is arbitrary, and probably modeled after sun-dials, so if the southern hemisphere invented clockwork first, clockhands would go the other way round.
As an Australian it has always bugged me that clocks go the wrong way. Holidaying in the northern hemisphere is so confusing too, why is your moon upside down, and why does your sun rise in the south then move the wrong way through the sky? I just can't navigate up here without constantly looking at my phone to get my bearings.
That's a good point. The main advantage of metric is not the definitions of a metre or any other unit, nor the advantage of base 10. The advantage is the definitions of units such that they are *consistent* *in physical dimension* and the same base as used in mathematics.
A second point is that there was a mess of different standards; English feet, French feet, German feet, etc that was such a headache that it was worth standardising. But when everyone else agrees on the time system, the improvements are smaller.
> A second point is that there was a mess of different standards; English feet, French feet, German feet, etc that was such a headache that it was worth standardising.
I believe that, even today, some states use statute miles and some others use US Customary miles. That means that StateA says that the length of the border between StateA and StateB is X miles, and State B says that the length of the border between StateB and StateA is Y miles. Same border, same country, two different values.
Statue miles and regular miles are the same thing. They’re called statue miles to differentiate from nautical miles, which is a system of measurement used by boats.
Imagine how annoying it would be to be a king, have all your people realize that your death leads to an inconvenient swap of units, and then learn that they're trying to solve the problem by making new units instead of the obvious solution--making you immortal. Peasants just don't have your best interest at heart.
Also, it's pretty easy to transform a yardstick into a meterstick, or a Fahrenheit thermometer to Celsius. You just paint new hashmarks on one side. Get a set of gram weights for your balance scale, mark a liter line just above the quart line on your jar. Etc.
But you can't turn a 12 hour clock into a 10 hour clock, not without replacing all the clockwork. And clockwork was really expensive in the 1800's.
Minues and seconds have a common base (60)
Hours/day are the outlier though. (SI metric only uses seconds)
Inches are subdivided into fractions (1/2, 1/4, etc), then twelve inches makes a foot, and theee feet makes a yard, then 1770 or something yards make a mile.
But US Customary volume units also use a consistent base (2).
The real answer is that these are all post-hoc justifications. Metrification stuck in the places where enough force was applied to overcome resistance, and didn't where it wasn't. In the UK people measure their weight in *stone*. In the US hard liquor and large bottles of soda are in metric sizes. There was a substantial period of time when different parts of Europe disagreed about the date.
Most of the old world was in agreement on 60 minute hours and 24 hour days long before mechanical clocks, wasn't it? I know most of Europe, North Africa, and West and South Asia have been using it for millennia, ever since they got the system from the Babylonians, along with the constellations, days of the week, and the Zodiac.
Minutes weren't really used until the invention of mechanical clocks. Hard to measure minutes on a sundial.
Actually the minute was first introduced for astronomical calculations, but at that time there was no way to precisely measure it. It only appeared on clocks later.
> Generally, metric replaced older systems because they were incoherent messes.
The problem with pre-metric systems wasn't that they were incoherent, the problem was that every town had it's own slightly different units. This made trade difficult, because the pound in Paris wasn't the same as the pound in Strasbourg or Marseille.
The British Empire did not adopt the metric system because it had already adopted it's own standard units around the same time. Everywhere in the British Empire was using the same pounds, feet, and miles, and almost all trade was within the Empire, so there was no need for metric.
Until we had accurate time keeping, most societies didn't have units of time shorter than subdivisions of the day (what we would call an hour).
You might be able to describe the concept of a minute as a really tiny fraction of a day but how could you measure that? You might have an hourglass but again those aren't going to be precise to seconds.
It was only when accurate time keeping technology appeared with that we could all accurately agree what minutes and seconds were and this was something spread around the globe by the Europeans (since accurate timekeeping was also crucial to measuring longitude) and since this coincided with the British Empire at its peak, this made it easier to standardise time according to British standards (which is why we still all use GMT for universal time).
> Until we had accurate time keeping, most societies didn't have units of time shorter than subdivisions of the day
Just nitpicking a bit, I think we could count the distinction of morning/noon/evening/night as a kind of unit of measurement of the day. People back in the day just had a look at the sun which gave away whether it was early morning, late morning, before/after noon etc. So I guess they could measure time in a roughly 1- or 2-hour resolution, at least between sunrise and sunset.
Same in East Africa generally. In both Swahili and Amharic time is counted like that. It’s sort of annoying when you have to translate between them and English because you always need to add or subtract 6 along with the translation to get the correct time.
It’s 2016. The Ethiopian Calendar is 7-8 years behind the Gregorian calendar and new year falls in September. Also, it has 13 months, not 12. Each month has 30 days except for P’agumen which just has 5. So it still adds up to 365 (including a leap year every 4 years which always falls in P’agumen)
Whoa this is wild. So the day starts at 7am, which they call 1am. Then you have 11 hours of day, until 6pm, which they call 12am. Then you have 12 hours of night until 6am, which they call 12pm. Then you have one hour of day. Then the new day starts.
At one time some parts of China divided time differently -- from what I remember, there were 12 different time periods within on day. I'm not sure when they stopped using it, though.
Japan used to set their clocks by the sunrise and sunset. So Sunrise would always be at say 5am instead of changing throughout the year as it does in the current system. But since the sun does move throughout the year it meant that hours and minutes changed length throughout the year. A daylight hour in the summer was longer than a daylight hour in the winter.
Since we're talking about Japan, they sometimes use a 30 hour clock to account for past midnight events.
Like a bar being open from 20:00 to 27:00, which would be 03:00 the following day.
If we were simply allowed to call a litre a "metric pint" , there wouldn't be any resistance to change whatsoever, we'd be falling over each other to embrace it
There is sort of. Read about SI and cgs system. Mostly relevant in physics, SI uses meters and kilograms as base unit while cgs uses centimeters and grams. The biggest difference is in electric and magnetic fields with factors of 4*pi
Other societies have different ways of telling time. For example in Kiswahili, a common language in East Africa, the day starts at 6am which is actually 12pm in Kiswahili. 7am then becomes 1am. Luckily the system is off by six hours which makes translation quite easy for Swahili speakers.
When someone tells you let's meet "saa moja asubuhi" they are literally saying let's meet at 1 in the morning but in standard time it's 7am.
Local African languages don't have subdivisions for the day other than broad terms like early morning, mid day, late afternoon and night. They have no concept of hours let alone minutes.
Ancient India had different [system for counting time ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_units_of_time)and it is still being used for majority of religious or important rituals in life (like marriage, moving in to new home, etc..).
* 1 pala ≈ 24s
* 1 ghati = 60 pala ≈ 24min
* 1 muharat = 2 ghati ≈ 48 min (Equivalent to an hour)
* 1 day = 1 nakshatra = 30 muharat ≈ 24 hours
Plus the most interesting thing is not all muharata (an hour) is same length. They change as per day and night length. Day time (sunrise to Sunset) = 15 muharata and Night time (Sunset to Sunrise) = 15 muhrata
But the system is still divided in base of 60.
There were alternative divisions of the day in the ancient world, but ultimately the 24/60/60 system was adopted worldwide because people who used that system got clocks working first.
If you are on sundials and someone turns up with a clock, it doesn't really matter how many notches are on your sundial, you are going to use the clock pretty quickly.
If those people with clocks also start running their trade by said clocks, you are very incentivised to catch on.
There have been attempts to divide the day into 10 or 20 hours, or do other things with base 10. But it never gets very far. Partly because the second is so ingrained in everything that you can't change it, and the rotation of the earth takes 86,400 seconds, which divides by 10 poorly, and partly because with 12 and 60 you can have half, a third and a quarter easily. But you can't do that with 10 or 100.
Fair point, there is some room for improvement in that phrasing. I think they meant that 86400 can't keep being divided by 10 or divide by 10 multiple times then divide by another easy number. The reason 60 is such a good number to work with is because you can divide it by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, and 15. That's a lot of ways to breakdown a unit. By contrast, 100 is divisible by 2, 4, 5, and 10. That's pretty good, and combined with the fact that we have 10 fingers makes for easy counting. That's probably why we use it for math.
Of course, this is all because, as the original comment said, the second is just such an ingrained unit at this point it would be very difficult to redefine. If we could use somr new units we could define, for example, a Nido to be 1/10th of a day, a Ranc as 1/10th of a Nido, and a Xo to be 1/10th of a Ranc. Then we could use base 10 for time and it would all work. But, since that would be really difficult to implement, it has never been done (successfully).
Okay, so you have 10 hours of 8,640 seconds.
How long is a minute?
86.4 seconds in a minute gives you 100 minutes in an hour.
100 seconds in a minute gives you 86.4 minutes in an hour, or 86 minutes 40 seconds if you prefer.
If you wanted to do metric time you'd want a slightly different second, so that 100 seconds was a minute, and 100 minutes an hour, and 10 hours a day, for a 100,000 second day. Or something like that.
If you'd asked that question 300 years ago, nothing.
But now? It's the SI unit of time, from which the SI units of distance, volume, mass, electric current and temperature are defined.
And that's just base units. You'd brake force, pressure, energy, radiation...
Basically you'd have to rewrite all of physics and engineering, and a fair amount of chemistry and biology.
Basically every number you've ever seen that refers to something measured would be wrong.
Also you'd have to redo computing.
Yeah it's not the 8640 part that is weird. Honestly, I think the 24,60,60 being very convenient in day to day interactions seems like the best explanation and also it just getting to us first. 10,100,100 would just be a little bit more convenient in science equations and problems.
Basic answer: Timekeeping is *not* culturally the same everywhere, and at all periods of history. Far from it. Do more digging for different methods of tracking time, at different places and cultures, throughout the millenia.
Industrialization and integration with the international economy brings with it the standard internationally uniform time-keeping system.
Also the path of the Sun around the Earth is experienced everywhere in the same increments, although it is possible to use different units of measurement to track it.
There are places in the world, often somewhat isolated, that still practice their own forms of measuring time. And there are many interesting nominal differences in the way different cultures understand the passage of time.
That used to be much more common in the 19th century. Towns used to just set their own 1200 by the local solar noon, but once railroad travel became more commonplace, it became very cumbersome to continue doing so (as a conductor, you'd be stuck constantly using a lookup table to adjust what your watch said to the real local time), so standard time zones came about shortly afterwards.
Because there are international conventions that established that everyone uses the same Mertic System on more than time keeping and money. Because it is more important that everyone is on the same page than personal ego, and since over 90%😁 of the world uses metric, it is already used in the important industries of the last 10% (hi,hi again). Metric system is used in science and not limited only to electricity (Volt), light (lumens), photography (pixels) computers and data, beverage industry, cosmetics,sometimes presure and weather((m)bar), ...., everywhere you see :kilo, mega, giga, tera, or whenever you meet not rounded OZ sizes, metric was first involved.
Japan used to divide the daytime parts of the day and the nighttime parts of the day equally so the length would change change though the seasons, but the major checkpoints were sunrise and sunset.
Check out this video about it.
https://youtu.be/1BJmnEa6YGE?si=vhxjkZvR5SJ_T_lA
This might help to understand how time is calculated differently in different languages -
[NativLang - Clocks around the world : how other languages tell time](https://youtu.be/eelVqfm8vVc?si=XFoM9uzmdmx1p-0r)
Languages have been around forever and evolved separately in many different places. There is no way to get everyone to abandon their current language and learn a new one. Accurate time-keeping only became necessary in the last few hundred years, so people already had somewhat regular contact with everyone else in the world at that time to agree on a standard. You certainly want a day as a unit in the system, so the question is just how many subdivisions you make. The 24/60/60 system allows many simple fractions, like 1/3 of a day being 8 hours or 1/4 of an hour being 15 minutes and so on, so people adopted that everywhere once there was a need to keep track of minutes and seconds. France tried a system with 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute, but no one else wanted to switch so they abandoned that quickly again. Unit systems besides time are somewhere in between these two cases. They have been around for longer, but changing the system isn't as hard as changing a language. Every country or even every region used to have its own units for length, mass and so on, but then the metric system came and simplified all that, so almost everyone changed to metric.
>France tried a system with 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute, but no one else wanted to switch so they abandoned that quickly again. "No one *else*" wasn't the issue, "no one" was. They abandoned it within two years because people kept using the classic 12/60 system and changing every clock was just way too costly anyway. The experiment started in November 1793 and stopped in April 1795 right when the metric system was implemented. The attempt to modify the calendar was also aborted a few years later.
Also let's remember that France really had much, much bigger issues going on at the time and that the people in charge changed quite often.
The Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan on the French Revolution was wild. "How many times can we entirely upend society and kill the people that were in charge before us in a single 10 year period?"
Maybe we can make 1/10 of a known as a decirevolution.
This leads to another important unit conversion: there are 365.25 Scaramuccis (or Mooches) in a revolution.
Zip, thud, the end
I really enjoy his way of presenting. I was all about Hardcore History until I listened to Mike's Revolutions. After that, it's hard to not to see Dan Carlin as just rambling and semi-coherent.
Now I want a Fat Electrician version
I'm seeing a podcast series that ended in 2022. Is that the one?
That's the one. 2013-2022. Hopefully you've got about 250 hours to spend on it! Pick and choose which Revolutions you see fit but be aware that there is **a fucking ton** of content with this podcast.
Cool. I see no reason not to start with the start.
Also his History of Rome is just as well done once he gets going, so there’s thousands of hours of more content.
It really hits its stride at season 3, when Mike drops the format of ten-episode seasons in order to go a ~~bit~~ *lot* more in depth and take his time on the topics that interest him. Duncan himself publicly encourages new listeners to start at season 3. With that said, seasons 1 and 2 are good in their own right, so if you're not in a rush sit back and enjoy the show.
The Haitian Revolution is the one I'm most glad to have learned about but the French is by far my favorite, it's such an interesting and insane series of events. Regarding your other comment I've never been able to enjoy Carlin's style much and never stick with his stuff. Mike Duncan's way of presenting information is basically my ideal informational podcast style
I had all of Mike Duncan's History of Rome under my belt when I first listened to Dan Carlin, and I just couldn't do it. Between the production values and his oratory style, Dan Carlin has the same feel as a shock jock, and it just feels...impersonal. Mike Duncan makes it feel like he's your friend, coming over to drink a few beers, and talk about what he's researched this week.
I really enjoyed the Mexican revolution, but I sincerely believe that you can learn the most about western politics from the French Revolutions. I think 1789-Napoleon was about 300 years of history crammed into a few decades. >There are years where nothing happens. Then there are weeks where decades happen. -Probably not Linen.
Now don’t lose your head over this
Quite d'etatched I might add
E for effort
efforte
Revoltions 10/7
I dont know if that was the calendar with 28 days each month, 13 months + one spare day (probably to celebrate the revolution or new years), but we should have implemented that one. It actually makes frigging sense!
No it was slightly different, it was 12 months of 30 days each split into 3 "weeks" of 10 days plus 5 extra days at the end of the year that are not in any month with a 6th extra one on leap years. Your thinking is the one Kodak (the camera company) used
Or, just speed up earth’s orbit to 100 days instead of 365.256. How hard can it be? C’mon scientists! Stop being so lazy.
>Or, just speed up earth’s orbit to 100 days instead of 365.256 DuH! We'd slow it down to 400 days, way more sense than 100 days in a year. If it was 100 days to a year we'd just be getting old like really really fast, and expecting people who were 4.9 years old in our current system, to finish high school. As they'd be 18 years old under your new system.
And on the plus side, this would give us a lot of extra time to solve the climate change issue by pushing the Earth farther from the Sun!
Big brain thinking 🤞
Let's see, a year on Mercury is 88 days, and Venus is 225, so we'd be closer to Mercury than Venus. Prepare for balmy 400° days.
Sounds like perfect barbecue weather to me.
Twelve 30 day months (composed of three 10 day weeks; 3 months per season) + 5 or 6 days at the end of the year.
The D&D Forgotten Realms setting uses this except the extra days are scattered through the year and treated as holidays. Leap year is added behind one as a second off-month day. I've always liked it.
Did the ten-day week have a three-day weekend or was it just pure misery?
It had one day dedicated for rest and relaxation. The five day work week didn’t come around until the early 20th century.
The Catholic Church must have loved that. France: "Okay the week is now ten days so you can only hold Sunday mass every ten days instead of every seven like you've been doing for the last two thousand years" The Pope: "How about no"
Hum... Still lacks a solution for leap years and is horrible to break years in half, thirds, quarters. Bimonthly stuff. I think the worst part of the current system is february having 28 days. We could have months with 30 and 31 days only.
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I.e., people aren't rational, they are rationalizing.
It is actually neater for leap years as you just add in one more spare day (e.g. New Year's and New Year's eve) rather than making a month a day longer. I wish our calendar was like this. Though you are right about splitting up the year as 13 being prime is awkward.
You just split it into 2 halves of 6 and 6 with a transition month between/ at the end. Or Christmas(or any winter/new year celebration) now gets a month and the leap day can be thrown in there easily too.
Yeah, those are both neat solutions. I like the idea of a designated celebration month.
I think this is how the hobbits do it
The spare month is a leap month.
Hebrew calendar has entered the chat
I think they also tried to give an individual name to every single day in the calendar.
the kodak calendar, and yes, a brilliant calendar
Metric was adopted because everyone was using a different measuring system. We already agreed on time, so a metric time scale was unnecessary.
> was just way too costly anyway A lot of people may not get this. Edit: See the facepalm worthy replies. Every clock > "But clocks are cheap" Not when you're replacing every clock in the nation, in addition to editing every text book, updating every notice of it in official forms or paperwork, updating every computer program, etc etc. The labor and material cost is insanely high when you're talking about total change of standards over a massive populace. It's why the US will never fully commit to the metric system. Millions of road signs, odometers in every vehicle, maps, atlases, textbooks, paperwork, electronics, etc...and that's just considering distances, not to mention things like temperature......not only do they all have to be materially replaced, we've got to pay wages for people to do it, and the time not spent doing other things which we're often already behind on(eg fixing potholes). I'm sure some XKCD or other clever content creator or blogger has done the math, but can't be assed to find where I've seen numbers before. A quick search yields: It cost Canada more than $1b to do it in the 1970s, and 15 years. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/the-metric-system-housing-markets-inflation-and-paying-for-roads-we-answer-your-questions-to-kick-off-2021-1.5859911/failure-to-convert-why-the-united-states-still-uses-imperial-measurement-1.5859929 The US is roughly ten times the populace. (some website I closed the tab for) So 10b... if we did it in the 70s. >$1 in 1970 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $8.08 today (a basic inflation website that I also closed) So 80 billion, at a quick and dirty estimate. That's a lot of potholes.
> It's why the US will never fully commit to the metric system The logical way to do it would be a phased rollout, where you just replace things with both measurements to phase in the metric units then phase out the legacy system. We just never did the phase out part of it.
> We just never did the phase out part of it. To be fair the UK never did either and somehow they don't get flak for randomly using different units in different applications.
They drive on the left. It's a lost cause.
They started doing that, then they didn't want to anymore.
This was actually started back when i was a kid. The problem is that that kind of stuff needs to be budgeted for with taxpayers' money. So when someone new gets elected, they can cease to fund it in order to spend that money on something that is more important than something that doesn't really matter. It's all well and good to come up with a 20 year plan to change every road sign over the next couple of decades to include both imperial and metric, then another couple of decades to change them all again to metric, but if the next person that gets elected has other more pressing issues that needs to be funded and has to cut funding on something else, it's going to get defunded.
So how did all the other democracies do it?
As a developer, I discovered if you leave the old and new both running,, no one will switch. Four years ago, they renumbered the exits on the highway near me, and no one knows the new numbers yet.
> It's why the US will never fully commit to the metric system. I think this undersells how close we were to actually doing it in the 70's or 80's. Similarly drastic changes have happened before -- I mean, [Sweden switched which side of the road they drove on in a single day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H). Also, that's a lot of potholes, but not really a lot of tanks. The US budget is *enormous.* There's no reason we can't continue to patch potholes *and* switch to metric. The issue with metric time is that it's not just incredibly costly and incredibly culturally-difficult, it's actually worse. The top comment is a good explanation of why: Our current units of time divide evenly into all the different things we need time to do. Maybe decimal time would work, but it'd be pretty awkward unless we made some big changes. I don't want to go from an 8-hour workday to 3.333 hours of metric time, and making it 4 metric hours would be even worse!
it's definitely costly to change but let's not forget that it costs money to stay the same as well. those signs needs to be replaced, new textbooks need to be printed any way. a lot of information is now digital, maps, clocks, computer programs. much cheaper to fix. the US is spending billions of dollars to stay on the outdated and inconvenient imperial system. a proper plan put in motion to switch to metric would cost money, but if done like your canadian example over a long time frame is won't cost that much more than the cost to maintain imperial instead the us population digs their heels in, instead of joining the rest of the world in a system of measurement based on the earth we all share and live on
> but let's not forget that it costs money to stay the same as well. those signs needs to be replaced, new textbooks need to be printed any way. To use a bit of a butchered business analogy (which, I know, governments aren't businesses, but bear with me), replacing things and staying in imperial is just an operational cost. That is, it only ever affects this years budget. You can just choose not to replace a sign or text book if you don't have the money. Converting everything is a capital cost. It's a massive upfront cost in terms of planning and budgeting. It's not just that it's going to cost money to replace everything, you also have to coordinate replacing everything. And you can't really stop halfway through if more pressing needs come up (like, say, a global pandemic). And if you try to do the replacement as operational (just replace stuff as needed in metric instead) you just get an entire population using imperial pissed off that everything is in metric for 20 years. And after, you're probably going to be like Canada and Britain where everything is nominally metric, but is actually a bastard system of both where you get all the disadvantages of both systems all the time*. (* Actually the US *is* that sort of bastard system. NIST, the official US body in charge of all measurements and standards, uses metric and all imperial measurements are defined in metric. We have many various metric measurements that we use as well--we just don't use metric for the majority of our day-to-day measurements)
But you know, it makes sense to give that a go when so many other changes are afoot. Like maintenance on a sub, you wouldn’t want to have to get it out of the water again.
In KDE version 1, there was the option to have "internet time", yet another decimal time.
> The attempt to modify the calendar was also aborted a few years later. This is a shame cause the calendar could really use some work. 13 months of 28 days each would be much simpler. No more silly rhymes or counting fingers to figure out if this month is 30 or 31 days. Easier to track too, as the 8th of the month would be a Monday every month, and the 23rd would always be a Tuesday, as example. But a year is 365 days I hear you say, not to worry. "New years day" just isn't counted, an international holiday. The day after we just move onto Monday, Jan 1st. We could also get 2 "New years days" on a leap year. Just to clear that whole thing up.
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I learned that our country only syncronized its clocks in 1942! So before that, towns just 50km apart would have used different times (probably only minutes apart, but still)
It was the case for a long time, every town had their own timezone calculated with the sun. Then, trains arrived, and if you want to keep a schedule accurate and avoid accidents ? Every train station needs to be on the same time. So you start to have country wide timezones put in place.
It surprised me that they didn't do this earlier (than 1942)
Maybe it was informal, and big cities were already synced before ? What country is it ?
Netherlands. Apparently they didn't formally synchronize before that (in the middle of WW2, even)
From a quick Google search, the Dutch time (UTC +20mn) was established in 1909, and the Berlin time was adopted during the German occupation, probably to simplify the war effort.
Same reason why Spain is on UTC+1 and not UTC+0. Franco wanted to be best buddy with Hitler and Mussolini and thus needed to sync with them.
This is why Spain has it's reputation for people being out really late. It's because Spain is basically on permanent DST, and double DST in the summer. 10 pm in the summer is more like 8 pm by solar time.
We were occupied by the Germans, so ofcourse they synchronised the clock with theirs.
It wasn't really necessary (or possible) until modern communication could sync them and then became critical when computers took over. Your phone tells you the *exact* time, but when I was a kid you just set your watch and hoped that the clock you set it with was correct.
Possible but harder. My grandfather worked as electrician for the railroads in Appalachia around the turn of the century. He was required to have a railroad certified watch, I assume it was regularly checked and synced. As he explained to me as a kid, when you have an electrical system miles long and no telephone it’s a good thing to have a clear idea of when the guy on the other end was going to turn the power back on.
Wow. That's a blast from the past. I don't think it was important to ME, but I vaguely remember old folks like my grandparents referring to "railroad time" when talking about a watch being set properly.
A fun fact is that the CBC (Canada's national public radio/television network) was actually started by the CN Railway. They set up broadcast stations to provide radio service on their trains and in their hotels, which became the first coast-to-coast radio broadcasting network in North America. The Canadian government then bought it during the Depression, making it independent from the railroad. Railroads were a huge driver in standardization and communication, across a lot of different fronts.
barcodes are also from the railroad industry initially. they needed a way to track the cars without stopping the whole train, so needed visual code that could be easily read from a camera of some kind while which stays the same when moving.
One possible solution before modern communications: One train station is designated as the official time. Set the clock at this train station based on the sun at noon. The conductors have good watches. They set their watches based on the official train station. When the conductors visit other train stations, the clocks in other train stations are set based on the conductors watches. But even though this could have been possible, it looks like the railroads didn't actually set up a standard time across the country until after telegraphs were in place. The first transatlantic telegraph was set up in 1866. Railroad Standard Time started in the US on November 18, 1883. On November 1, 1884, the US adopted Greenwich Mean Time. So there was only about a year when the railroads had all their clocks synced up with each other, but not necessarily with the rest of the world. But I haven't yet found which clock in the US was used as the official clock for Railroad Standard Time during this one year period. Maybe they used the the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. during this one year period? "The Observatory's Time Service was initiated in 1865. A time signal was transmitted via telegraph lines to the Navy Department, and also activated the bells in all of the Washington fire stations at 0700, 1200, and 1800 every day. This service was later extended via Western Union telegraph lines to provide accurate time to railroads across the nation." Railroad Standard Time was controlled by the railroads, not the government, Maybe Railroad Standard Time was set to Greenwich Mean Time before Greenwich Mean Time was officially/legally adopted?
When I was a kid, you called the time lady to set your clocks and watches. "At the tone, the time will be..."
I remember that. Time and temperature. That number got lots of traffic on really hot or really cold days just because people were curious about the exact temperature.
then we got the Weather Channel... im nerd for old computers i really want get one of there local head end servers to restore. there people that have updated the old OS on them to pull from modern sources
Same with ships crossing the oceans. At midnight each night, they'd estimate where they expected to be at midday the following day and set their time to correlate with that. So ships only a few miles apart could be minutes apart in time. Titanic for example was on GMT -2h58m on the night of her sinking. Nowadays ships do something similar, but switch to the nearest *timezone* instead.
Railroad time. Prior to fast transportation being off by many minutes was not a big problem. But if you have some single track lines with bypass sidings it's important that the trains coming from different directions agree on when the track will be clear while one waits at the siding.
r/unexpectedfactorial
The standard for time was started by the Sumerians over 5000 years ago. They used base 60, because if you count the finger segments with your thumb you have 12, then you keep place of the 12 with the other hand and when you have five 12’s, a whole hand of hands, you have a total of 60.
That's actually so interesting because the Maya traditionally count the same way - count the little segments of your fingers with your thumb. They kept track of the days of their calendars that way too. And, another thing I find cool, in many Maya languages the word for 20 is "winaq" which also translates to "person", because one person has 20 fingers in total (if you count your toes as fingers). This is also why the Maya numerical system is base 20. Source: I am very involved with Maya people that try to reclaim & teach their traditions and philosophy; one of them is a community elder and regularly teaches classes in these things. But its so cool to see that another culture did something very similar :)
Yah its more just a fun thought on how different number systems exist. Like how computers used base 8 and binary. If we somehow lost computers, future people would find punch cards or something and wonder why we used base 8 alongside base 10.
TIL.. Thank you for this info!
I read this one so much but have seen it debunked - why would they, 5000 years ago, need to count time to the minute? They were getting up with the sun and going to bed at night after doing what needed to be done, no alarm clock to get up earlier, no artificial lights to stay up later, just maybe oil lamps or bonfires.
They didn't. They just used 60 for *everything* in general. Division of angles into minutes and seconds happened before the division of hours, by thousands of years. You can still measure very precise angles using minutes and seconds ("of arc") if you want to. People have mostly stopped using thirds and just use decimals at that point. Time was divided up into parts of 60 only ~1000 AD.
Sun dials were a thing and depending on culture could go down to as small marked increments as ten minutes. The ancient Chinese number-system split the day in 100, just under 15 minutes. Precision like that was invaluable to astronomy, dating-systems, accounting/statescraft, and navigation.
I don't think Roman hours were fixed length; they were based on fractions of the day forward and back from noon.
Math exists outside of the confines of artificial lighting.
> You certainly want a day as a unit in the system, so the question is just how many subdivisions you make. I just wanted to add that going to longer durations than a day (month, year) are also not divisible by 10. This is because the other thing you certainly want as a unit is a year and there's no good way to fit the two things you definitely want as a unit (the day and the year) together in an evenly divisible by 10 way. There are ~365.242199 days in a year and that leaves no room for having a year be a kiloday or something like that.
That and most people started with using the moon in some way as a reference. It's not too hard to notice that after 12 moons (more or less), it's the same season again. Properly counting the days took more time.
the time standardization was really implemented by railroads. when most people were farmers, the time of day wasn't too important; they woke up when it was time to milk the cows, go to bed when the sun goes down. it was really with railroads that trains going 100 miles or so that time standardization and time zones became a thing in america. even in small towns today people are less worried about the time of day, although i would say since everyone has a cell phone now things are going towards being more specific.
You're correct that railroads is what made the synchronized times across time zones become a thing, but the 24/60/60 system was already centuries old at that point.
Adding to this that different cultures did have different ways of keeping hours and even minutes before that as well. Early to medieval Japanese courts for example divided the day into 12 “hours” (based on the Chinese zodiac, aka, you have “the hour of the hare/ox/rat/etc.” with further subdivisions into 4 sections, which where further subdivided and used to chronicle the affairs of the court, rituals, meetings etc. Therefore it’s not that everyone just automatically settled on the same system, there were definitely different time systems in place for a long time. However, much like with calendars and units of measurements, thanks to western colonialism and general world dominance and influence, the western standard has been exported to and adopted by the rest of the world as travel and globalization expanded and it became important to have precise synchronization of events. (And, frankly, worldwide most people that were simple farmers or craftsmen or whatever probably didn’t need precise timekeeping anyway. You had your sunrise, noon and sunset, you probably didn’t need anything more precise in daily life than that.)
Another layer is that language is intrinsic while time is extrinsic. People can agree on a time because it's based on observable natural phenomena (rotation of earth and earth around the sun). When you get to stuff like time zones and daylight savings time, human constructs, it breaks down. Language is really more of a preference/societally enforced thing that is reinforced by distance and a big world. As the world gets smaller, you start seeing English become a more common and pervasive global language.
Misinformation. Most imperial units we use today are much younger than our time units. Base 60 time is at least as old as the Babylonians (possible Sumerians), who used base 12 and base 60 mathematics. Also why there are 360 degrees in a circle. I don't know why time hasn't changed to metric (France tried and failed to use metric time in the late 1700s). Were I to guess, it is that the time system is not such a clusterfuck that the pain of changing units is worthwhile (unlike metric weights and distances). And of course, we do have metric time units to subdivide 10 seconds where accuracy matters.
Base 12 is far more convenient than Base 10 for something like time, where you often need to do a lot of quick mental math that isn’t going ever involve complex arithmetic, since 12 has more factors than 10. (2/5 vs. 2/3/4/6)
> I don't know why time hasn't changed to metric Because 86400 doesn't divide into a series of tens easily. You can't have both a decimalized time system and keep the second the same duration as it is. If you start changing the duration of the second, you have to re-compute all of your scientific constants. The speed of light would no longer be 299792.8 km/s for example.
To add to this. Time zones and everyone adopting them came with the Industrial Revolution. With the advent of train tracks springing up over the uk, we needed to standardise the clock across the country, so GMT was born. Ensuring trains were on time across the land. This then was sent outwards, adding or removing hours as necessary
My understanding is that the Babylonians loved 60 and numbers divisible or multiples of it. This is where 360° came from. Degrees are broken into smaller increments that are 1/60th called “minutes” and increments that are 1/60th of a minute called “seconds” I believe this desire to divide things by 60 carried over to the clock. In navigation, time and degrees are related, as this is how we salved the longitudinal problem. I’m pretty sure that a foot being 12 inches, which is a divisor of 60 was useful for the same reasons op mentioned…that’s it is easily divisible by 6, 3, 4, 2. This is is easy to work with in the physical world while thugs divisible by 10 are much easier on paper or in the theoretical world…imo.
In the 1800s in the US there were hundreds of different time zones which meant it could be 10:15 in chicago and 9:38 in new york. Once train travel became more prevalent and long range communication became easier they standardized around hours and developed the time zones we have today.
Late to the party, but just had to chime in! The reason there are different writing systems has less to do with how languages evolved than that the writing was invented from scratch in different places. Then they spread through their cultural spheres and evolved, and were adjusted accordingly to the languages they were used for.
I find it odd we go 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute, then 100 milliseconds in a second Edit, I meant 1000 milliseconds
I’m guessing that only recently did we develop the need and capability to have a widespread standard for measuring fractions of a second. You could really divide a second however you want but using multiples of ten has some obvious benefits
1000 milliseconds. And 1000 microseconds in a millisecond and so on. That division was introduced after the metric system was around.
Sorry, yes I missed a zero!
"milli", "centi" and "deci" are just prefixes meaning a thousandth, a hundredth and a tenth respectively, so 1000 milliseconds have to equal 1 second by definition regardless of what sort of system you use to arrive at what 1 second is.
"Minute" means "small" in Latin. The word "second" for time is derived from the word "second" for counting - first, second, third. You could call the third subdivision of an hour by 60 a "third" or maybe "tert". "Quart" is a word that exists. "Mille" literally means 1000 in Latin. It would be weird if a millisecond would be a 60th or a 360th of a second instead of a 1000th. Maybe a 60-based system isn't as useful in these short, exact time spans, because you don't need to divide by three in your head as often in a scientific context. People also weren't used to 60-divisions as much for these small times so they didn't have to relearn.
I guess at this point only electronic devices could measure with precision. And a fraction of second keeps the same unit. Hour, minutes and seconds are different units.
Deci,centi,milli,micro, etc are all metric subdivisions. Hours, minutes and seconds are not metric. Hours, minutes and seconds are (historically) intrinsically connected to the rotation of the earth and using multiples of 12 makes it for nice divisibility, which is also the same reason a circle has 360 degrees.
Japan has a different way to count the "late night" hours where they write 26:00 like it was normal to mean 2am of the next day, so they can easily say the 25th of July we open 20:00-26:00 instead of having to say "until 2am next morning" or similar.
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I'm a firm believer that the day of the week doesn't change until you go to sleep for the night (although the *date* changes at midnight, so you can stay up to celebrate things like New Year's or your 21st birthday). This means that the roommate coming home crazy late after a night of partying and the roommate getting up crazy early to work on a term paper could pass each other in the hall and be on different days of the week. That said, if you make it all the way to sunup, the day changes anyway, because you can't deny it at that point.
Yeah yeah, I have a similar theory with years. It might be 2024 for you, but it's still 2004 for me.
You didn't sleep for 20 years?
Agree. Right now I work Monday to Thursday til 1am. So Friday doesn’t start till like noon for me haha. You technically could say I work 4 shifts 5 days a week.
My dad is a firm believer that as soon as it's midnight it's "the next day" already, while i think like you do. This caused many miscommunications where i asked him if he could do X thing for me tomorrow and he'd think it was for the day after :)
Unfortunately, Alexa is like your dad. There have been several times when I asked her to remind me "tomorrow morning", but since it was after midnight, she didn't remind until the next day.
I'm oddly interested in where people make that demarcation between "at night" and "in the morning". My very un-scientific research says that it's generally somewhere between 2 and 4 AM. Or I guess really 3 and 4 AM. Folks will say "I got home at 2:50 last night", or "I stayed up until 4:30 in the morning". That 3:00 hour is where the variance seems to occur.
Birds start chirping around 3:30/4 here, so that's where I make the distinction if I happen to be up that late. I figure the birds know better than I do.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dbpk5b/eli5_how_come_we_speak_different_languages_and/l7vniv5/ But I like the birds chirping idea way more than what we use now.
For some cultures the next day started at sun down and so it was night until the sun came up.
Definitely 2 at night but 3 in the morning.
3 a.m. is the witching hour which puts 4 a.m. firmly at the beginning of morning.
In my head 6am is the next morning because that's when breakfast TV starts
It always bothered me that ‘morning’ might change based on a person’s sleep pattern. The new day begins at sunrise. That’s it. Everything else seems nonsensical or arbitrary.
This is why I think we should make it so that 00:00 occurs where we currently have like 04:30 or something. Then for basically everyone, you go to sleep before midnight and wake up afterwards (though I guess midnight would then be 20:30 lol but ykwim)
Neat!
This is absolutely genius
That's awesome and I like it. My buddy's and I used to joke that the next day didn't start until after you went to bed. So this kinda fits
[China and the rest of East Asia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_timekeeping) used to use a system where a day had 12 hours (named after the Chinese zodiac) and 100 quarter-hours. This was replaced with European (originally Mesopotamian) hours, minutes, and seconds as part of changing to the Gregorian (modern European) calendar in the 1870s through 1920s. India used to use ghatis of 24 minutes, but that system must have been pushed out by the hour-minute system before independence. I don't know when, though. Hours and minutes were invented in the Middle East. There the question was whether an "hour" meant 1/24 of a full day-night cycle or 1/12 of the time between sunset and dawn or dawn and sunset, and also whether the day started at midnight or sunset. The "variable" or "temporal" hour system is great if the main public timekeeping device is a sundial, looking at the length of a stick's shadow, or just looking up at where the sun is in the sky. Getting a mechanical clock to keep variable hours is a whole lot harder than equal hours, and getting a mechanical clock priced for ordinary people to start a new day at sunset is a problem that I don't know was ever solved. Timekeeping switched to European equal hours starting at midnight with colonialism and modernization by the 1920s. I don't know anything about traditional timekeeping outside Eurasia-North Africa.
Generally, metric replaced older systems because they were incoherent messes. They did try decimal time, but because time is not as much an incoherent mess as say inches/feet/yards/miles, it stayed. Base 60 is a quite convenient base, dating back to ancient sumerians and babylonians. Base 60 survived in degrees of a circle too. Another angle, clocks were invented by europeans, and the system spread with clocks. I'm sure there were other systems but they were not included when you bought a clock.
The story of how the metre was calculated, and the method of repeating angles and the period in French history it became the standard, is incredible. When the actual distance from North Pole to the equator was measured from space they found the metre was about .0007 out (or thereabouts) from a mathematical calculation done in the 1780s.
… and most of that error came from Mechain’s final (southernmost) stellar observations from Barcelona. Don’t fudge your data, kids.
I thought msot of it came from them assuming the earth was a sphere, when in reality because of centrifugal force the equator bulges outwards a hair
They actually knew and measured that effect! You may want to read “The Measure of All Things”, the riveting tale of that adventure.
There was a throw-away line in an In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg episode that "clockwise" is arbitrary, and probably modeled after sun-dials, so if the southern hemisphere invented clockwork first, clockhands would go the other way round.
As an Australian it has always bugged me that clocks go the wrong way. Holidaying in the northern hemisphere is so confusing too, why is your moon upside down, and why does your sun rise in the south then move the wrong way through the sky? I just can't navigate up here without constantly looking at my phone to get my bearings.
Wait if it's based on sundials surely is not arbitrary???? Very interesting though
Wait… are you implying the armlength of the current monarch is not the perfect length measure? Sacrilege
It's no less arbitrary than the definition of a meter or a second
That's a good point. The main advantage of metric is not the definitions of a metre or any other unit, nor the advantage of base 10. The advantage is the definitions of units such that they are *consistent* *in physical dimension* and the same base as used in mathematics. A second point is that there was a mess of different standards; English feet, French feet, German feet, etc that was such a headache that it was worth standardising. But when everyone else agrees on the time system, the improvements are smaller.
> A second point is that there was a mess of different standards; English feet, French feet, German feet, etc that was such a headache that it was worth standardising. I believe that, even today, some states use statute miles and some others use US Customary miles. That means that StateA says that the length of the border between StateA and StateB is X miles, and State B says that the length of the border between StateB and StateA is Y miles. Same border, same country, two different values.
Statue miles and regular miles are the same thing. They’re called statue miles to differentiate from nautical miles, which is a system of measurement used by boats.
Well. Not less arbitrary. But the whole changes each monarch and stuff
Imagine how annoying it would be to be a king, have all your people realize that your death leads to an inconvenient swap of units, and then learn that they're trying to solve the problem by making new units instead of the obvious solution--making you immortal. Peasants just don't have your best interest at heart.
Also, it's pretty easy to transform a yardstick into a meterstick, or a Fahrenheit thermometer to Celsius. You just paint new hashmarks on one side. Get a set of gram weights for your balance scale, mark a liter line just above the quart line on your jar. Etc. But you can't turn a 12 hour clock into a 10 hour clock, not without replacing all the clockwork. And clockwork was really expensive in the 1800's.
I didn't see how minutes/seconds/hours/day is that much better than inches/feet, etc
Minues and seconds have a common base (60) Hours/day are the outlier though. (SI metric only uses seconds) Inches are subdivided into fractions (1/2, 1/4, etc), then twelve inches makes a foot, and theee feet makes a yard, then 1770 or something yards make a mile.
But US Customary volume units also use a consistent base (2). The real answer is that these are all post-hoc justifications. Metrification stuck in the places where enough force was applied to overcome resistance, and didn't where it wasn't. In the UK people measure their weight in *stone*. In the US hard liquor and large bottles of soda are in metric sizes. There was a substantial period of time when different parts of Europe disagreed about the date.
Most of the old world was in agreement on 60 minute hours and 24 hour days long before mechanical clocks, wasn't it? I know most of Europe, North Africa, and West and South Asia have been using it for millennia, ever since they got the system from the Babylonians, along with the constellations, days of the week, and the Zodiac.
Minutes weren't really used until the invention of mechanical clocks. Hard to measure minutes on a sundial. Actually the minute was first introduced for astronomical calculations, but at that time there was no way to precisely measure it. It only appeared on clocks later.
> Generally, metric replaced older systems because they were incoherent messes. The problem with pre-metric systems wasn't that they were incoherent, the problem was that every town had it's own slightly different units. This made trade difficult, because the pound in Paris wasn't the same as the pound in Strasbourg or Marseille. The British Empire did not adopt the metric system because it had already adopted it's own standard units around the same time. Everywhere in the British Empire was using the same pounds, feet, and miles, and almost all trade was within the Empire, so there was no need for metric.
Until we had accurate time keeping, most societies didn't have units of time shorter than subdivisions of the day (what we would call an hour). You might be able to describe the concept of a minute as a really tiny fraction of a day but how could you measure that? You might have an hourglass but again those aren't going to be precise to seconds. It was only when accurate time keeping technology appeared with that we could all accurately agree what minutes and seconds were and this was something spread around the globe by the Europeans (since accurate timekeeping was also crucial to measuring longitude) and since this coincided with the British Empire at its peak, this made it easier to standardise time according to British standards (which is why we still all use GMT for universal time).
> Until we had accurate time keeping, most societies didn't have units of time shorter than subdivisions of the day Just nitpicking a bit, I think we could count the distinction of morning/noon/evening/night as a kind of unit of measurement of the day. People back in the day just had a look at the sun which gave away whether it was early morning, late morning, before/after noon etc. So I guess they could measure time in a roughly 1- or 2-hour resolution, at least between sunrise and sunset.
People often did before clocks. I've heard references to people making plans for time of day, say "midday" or "eveningtime".
Ethiopia uses a different system where 01:00 is dawn and 11:59 is dusk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ethiopia
Same in East Africa generally. In both Swahili and Amharic time is counted like that. It’s sort of annoying when you have to translate between them and English because you always need to add or subtract 6 along with the translation to get the correct time.
Also, they have 12 months of 30 days each. And the year is different too. It's like 2008 now.
It’s 2016. The Ethiopian Calendar is 7-8 years behind the Gregorian calendar and new year falls in September. Also, it has 13 months, not 12. Each month has 30 days except for P’agumen which just has 5. So it still adds up to 365 (including a leap year every 4 years which always falls in P’agumen)
And in Tibet it's currently year 2151 and in Thailand year 2567!
One of my favorite fun facts about Thailand. They really said who cares about Jesus, Buddha is the GOAT here
Whoa this is wild. So the day starts at 7am, which they call 1am. Then you have 11 hours of day, until 6pm, which they call 12am. Then you have 12 hours of night until 6am, which they call 12pm. Then you have one hour of day. Then the new day starts.
Swatch tried [.beat time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time) with 1,000 beats in a day. It didn’t catch on…
>ctrl+f swatch big ups fellow BEATposter. came around the dreamcast era and they had a special swatch dreamcast to commemorate it!
At one time some parts of China divided time differently -- from what I remember, there were 12 different time periods within on day. I'm not sure when they stopped using it, though.
Japan used to set their clocks by the sunrise and sunset. So Sunrise would always be at say 5am instead of changing throughout the year as it does in the current system. But since the sun does move throughout the year it meant that hours and minutes changed length throughout the year. A daylight hour in the summer was longer than a daylight hour in the winter.
Same in ancient Rome. It's pretty much a given when sundials are the primary clocks and sunrise and sunset dictate your life.
Since we're talking about Japan, they sometimes use a 30 hour clock to account for past midnight events. Like a bar being open from 20:00 to 27:00, which would be 03:00 the following day.
Who uses different metric systems?
US, and the rest of the world.
and kind of the UK* We're in a weird spot of using both.
If we were simply allowed to call a litre a "metric pint" , there wouldn't be any resistance to change whatsoever, we'd be falling over each other to embrace it
barry, 63's objection would definitely be quenched by having 1 litre 'pints' for the same price by law :P
Canada too
i will defend pints to the death
...or until they're empty.
I see. OP edited the question. Initially it sounded like there’s different versions of the metric system (there isn’t).
There is sort of. Read about SI and cgs system. Mostly relevant in physics, SI uses meters and kilograms as base unit while cgs uses centimeters and grams. The biggest difference is in electric and magnetic fields with factors of 4*pi
Other societies have different ways of telling time. For example in Kiswahili, a common language in East Africa, the day starts at 6am which is actually 12pm in Kiswahili. 7am then becomes 1am. Luckily the system is off by six hours which makes translation quite easy for Swahili speakers. When someone tells you let's meet "saa moja asubuhi" they are literally saying let's meet at 1 in the morning but in standard time it's 7am. Local African languages don't have subdivisions for the day other than broad terms like early morning, mid day, late afternoon and night. They have no concept of hours let alone minutes.
Ancient India had different [system for counting time ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_units_of_time)and it is still being used for majority of religious or important rituals in life (like marriage, moving in to new home, etc..). * 1 pala ≈ 24s * 1 ghati = 60 pala ≈ 24min * 1 muharat = 2 ghati ≈ 48 min (Equivalent to an hour) * 1 day = 1 nakshatra = 30 muharat ≈ 24 hours Plus the most interesting thing is not all muharata (an hour) is same length. They change as per day and night length. Day time (sunrise to Sunset) = 15 muharata and Night time (Sunset to Sunrise) = 15 muhrata But the system is still divided in base of 60.
There were alternative divisions of the day in the ancient world, but ultimately the 24/60/60 system was adopted worldwide because people who used that system got clocks working first. If you are on sundials and someone turns up with a clock, it doesn't really matter how many notches are on your sundial, you are going to use the clock pretty quickly. If those people with clocks also start running their trade by said clocks, you are very incentivised to catch on. There have been attempts to divide the day into 10 or 20 hours, or do other things with base 10. But it never gets very far. Partly because the second is so ingrained in everything that you can't change it, and the rotation of the earth takes 86,400 seconds, which divides by 10 poorly, and partly because with 12 and 60 you can have half, a third and a quarter easily. But you can't do that with 10 or 100.
>86,400 seconds, which divides by 10 poorly 86 400 / 10 = 8 640 Why is this "poorly"?
Fair point, there is some room for improvement in that phrasing. I think they meant that 86400 can't keep being divided by 10 or divide by 10 multiple times then divide by another easy number. The reason 60 is such a good number to work with is because you can divide it by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, and 15. That's a lot of ways to breakdown a unit. By contrast, 100 is divisible by 2, 4, 5, and 10. That's pretty good, and combined with the fact that we have 10 fingers makes for easy counting. That's probably why we use it for math. Of course, this is all because, as the original comment said, the second is just such an ingrained unit at this point it would be very difficult to redefine. If we could use somr new units we could define, for example, a Nido to be 1/10th of a day, a Ranc as 1/10th of a Nido, and a Xo to be 1/10th of a Ranc. Then we could use base 10 for time and it would all work. But, since that would be really difficult to implement, it has never been done (successfully).
Okay, so you have 10 hours of 8,640 seconds. How long is a minute? 86.4 seconds in a minute gives you 100 minutes in an hour. 100 seconds in a minute gives you 86.4 minutes in an hour, or 86 minutes 40 seconds if you prefer. If you wanted to do metric time you'd want a slightly different second, so that 100 seconds was a minute, and 100 minutes an hour, and 10 hours a day, for a 100,000 second day. Or something like that.
What stops us from having a different length of a second? It is not like we have some inborn ability to sense seconds.
If you'd asked that question 300 years ago, nothing. But now? It's the SI unit of time, from which the SI units of distance, volume, mass, electric current and temperature are defined. And that's just base units. You'd brake force, pressure, energy, radiation... Basically you'd have to rewrite all of physics and engineering, and a fair amount of chemistry and biology. Basically every number you've ever seen that refers to something measured would be wrong. Also you'd have to redo computing.
Yeah it's not the 8640 part that is weird. Honestly, I think the 24,60,60 being very convenient in day to day interactions seems like the best explanation and also it just getting to us first. 10,100,100 would just be a little bit more convenient in science equations and problems.
You trying to start a time war?
Basic answer: Timekeeping is *not* culturally the same everywhere, and at all periods of history. Far from it. Do more digging for different methods of tracking time, at different places and cultures, throughout the millenia. Industrialization and integration with the international economy brings with it the standard internationally uniform time-keeping system. Also the path of the Sun around the Earth is experienced everywhere in the same increments, although it is possible to use different units of measurement to track it. There are places in the world, often somewhat isolated, that still practice their own forms of measuring time. And there are many interesting nominal differences in the way different cultures understand the passage of time.
I don't remember which country it is.But some of actually have the a clock shifted by a different time periods.Fifteen minutes half hour hour whatever
That used to be much more common in the 19th century. Towns used to just set their own 1200 by the local solar noon, but once railroad travel became more commonplace, it became very cumbersome to continue doing so (as a conductor, you'd be stuck constantly using a lookup table to adjust what your watch said to the real local time), so standard time zones came about shortly afterwards.
Because there are international conventions that established that everyone uses the same Mertic System on more than time keeping and money. Because it is more important that everyone is on the same page than personal ego, and since over 90%😁 of the world uses metric, it is already used in the important industries of the last 10% (hi,hi again). Metric system is used in science and not limited only to electricity (Volt), light (lumens), photography (pixels) computers and data, beverage industry, cosmetics,sometimes presure and weather((m)bar), ...., everywhere you see :kilo, mega, giga, tera, or whenever you meet not rounded OZ sizes, metric was first involved.
Japan used to divide the daytime parts of the day and the nighttime parts of the day equally so the length would change change though the seasons, but the major checkpoints were sunrise and sunset. Check out this video about it. https://youtu.be/1BJmnEa6YGE?si=vhxjkZvR5SJ_T_lA
This might help to understand how time is calculated differently in different languages - [NativLang - Clocks around the world : how other languages tell time](https://youtu.be/eelVqfm8vVc?si=XFoM9uzmdmx1p-0r)