– Why do clocks go from 1 to 12 instead of 0 to 23 or 1 to 24?

Question

– Why do clocks go from 1 to 12 instead of 0 to 23 or 1 to 24?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Because we’ve been dividing the 24 hour solar day into a 12 hour day and night for thousands of years.

It’s much more useful and logical for human purposes to divide the day into a half that we do things (day) and the half that we sleep (night). Clocks were originally developed based on this convention- to easily tell a human what hour and minute it is, under the assumption they already know which half of the day they’re in.