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
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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