Like throughout our history we see so many differences between nations like with metric and imperial system, the different alphabet and so on, but how did time stay the same for everyone? Like why is a minute 60 seconds and not like 23.6 inch-seconds in America? Why isn’t there a nation that uses clocks that is based on base 10? Like a day is 10 hours and an hour has 100 minutes and a minute has 100 seconds and so on? What makes time the same across the whole globe?
In: Mathematics
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.
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.
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.
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).
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