Who, how and when decided to count to a second and was like “Yup. This is it. This is a second. This is how long a second is. Everybody on Earth will universally agree that this is how long a second is and use it regardless of culture, origin, intelligence or beliefs”?
In: 1035
A lot of ancient civilizations did things in groups of 12. This is a really easy number grouping when you need to split things up into groups (you can do groups of 2, 3, 4, or 6 easily while 10 things can only easily be shortly into groups of 2 or 5), and there are a lot of interesting coincidences related to 12.
If you use the phases of the moon to track a year, then you have around 12 cycles to a year. If you teach the number of days in a year, 365 is pretty close to 360 which is 12×30 (several ancient calendars had 12 30-day months and then a 5-day period at the end of the year that doesn’t fit inside those months). This is one reason why there are 360 degrees in a complete rotation–it’s pretty close to the number of days in a year and it’s a multiple of 12.
So it turns out if you split the day rotation into two 12s (12 night hours and 12 daylight hours) and then make those hours equal lengths, and then split those hours into 5 12s (5×12 being 60), and then split *those* into 5 12s, the amount of time that represents is a second.
Some people think that a counting system based around 10 is more intuitive since we have 10 fingers, but it’s a purely cultural thing that we count each finger as 1. In the Babylonian fingerer counting system for example, [they didn’t count their fingers but their finger segments for each finger other than the thumb](https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/how-10-fingers-became-12-hours#:~:text=Babylonians%20also%20used%20their%20hands,times%20five%20fingers%20is%2060.), which means they would count to twelve on one hand.
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