Perhaps you have wondered why the watch strapped to your wrist (how it actually works?), your mobile display or some kind of another damn clock on the planet shows 12 figures signifying 12 hours? The reason why isn’t it some other random number, like 28 or 16? What is the importance of twelve in our understanding of time?
let’s try to understand this process step-by-step. The 24-hour day idea comes from the ancient Egyptians.
The Egyptians separated the clock into 12 hours of daytime and 12 hours of night-time (or alternatively 10 hours between sunrise and sunset, one hour for every single twilight period and 12 hours of darkness). This is identified because of different sundials from the period which have been found to be marked with hours. 24 hours are divided into two parts – a day enduring 12 hours and nighttime lasting 12 hours. 1 hour contains 60 minutes, which also have 60 mere seconds each.
Each second is then divided into one thousand milliseconds. However, the absence of sunlight made it challenging to divide the time at night. It’s fairly interesting to find out how they managed to do this. Yes, the nighttime division of time was based on the observation of stars! In those olden days, with no complex technology to make use of, they instead chose 36-star groups (small constellations) called ‘decans’, which rose consecutively on the horizon as the earth rotated. Every decan rose before dawn and marked the start of a 10-day period. An overall total of 36 decans thus brought to 36*10=360 days of per year. From one the Twilight series to another, 18 of these decans were noticeable. However, each twilight period had 3 of these decans assigned, leaving twelve for the period of complete darkness (the duodecimal system is working here as well! ). Hence, the rise of every decan marked an hour, and we ended up with twelve hours each evening. However, at that time, the hours did not have a set length. The particular Greek astronomers who were then trying to find answers to the concerns of the universe, and stars and galaxies (in short… astronomers) found hard to manage computations with the prevailing method. Then, Hipparchus gave all of us the “Equinoctial hours” by proposing the division of a day into twenty-four equal hours. Even then, for a long time, ordinary people kept using the seasonally varying hrs. It wasn’t till the fourteenth century in Europe, when mechanical clocks arrived to use in Europe, that commoners commenced using the system that individuals practice to this day. The Greek astronomers who helped us make life simpler by similarly dividing 24 hours implemented the Babylonian’s sexagesimal (base 60) system for astronomical calculations. So, for convenience, they further divided an hour into 60 minutes and every minute into 60 secs. It really is unknown why the Babylonians used a bottom 60 system, but it can be because 60 is a special number for small fraction calculations. It is the smallest number divisible by the very first 6 counting amounts, and also by ten, 12, 15, 20 and 30.The concept of milliseconds is quite modern, and since we use a base 10 system, each second is split into 1000 milliseconds.
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