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.
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