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
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.
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