This a follow up to my earlier question on the lengths of months and weeks.
How did we decide that a second is 1000ms but a minute is 60s and so on
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So back in the day, the idea of a decimal system (base 10) was completely foreign. It was easiest to divide and multiply by smaller numbers. Doubles are easy, threes aren’t so bad either. Two threes gets you six. Two of those is a twelve. Five of those is sixty.
Because of this, numbers with lots of divisors became popular. 24, 60, 120, 360.
Because there’s *almost* 360 days in the year, 360 was picked to be a circle. One degree is one day (almost).
24 for hours in a day is arbitrary, but there’s also some convenient physical attributes to it. 360/24 is 15, and if you put your arm out straight and stick up your thumb, the base of your hand to the tip of your thumb will be 15 degrees. Concidence of human anatomy and proportions, it’s actually the same for pretty much everyone. But now you have a gauge for how long an hour is. Stick out your thumb, and wait for the sun to move from your thumb to the bottom of your hand. I’m pretty sure, though I have no source, that this is why 24 was chosen instead of 60 like they did for minutes and seconds.
Minutes and seconds were just dividing by 60, then 60 again.
It’s all totally arbitrary though, except for days in a year. You could say a day is ten hours long, an hour is ten minutes, and a minute is ten seconds. The value of all of those would be different from what we now use, but it wouldn’t fundamentally change anything.
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