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 very long time ago, people in Egypt decided to divide the daytime into 10 parts, and they added an extra part at the beginning and end of the daytime, so that’s 12 parts. They did this for nighttime too, so that’s 24 parts. Or hours.
But we needed a way to divide each of those hours again, so someone else from Afghanistan divided the hours into 60 minutes. Minute is what we call the time, but it also means something really small. Like “that ant is minute”. This person chose 60 minutes because 60 can be split by lots of other numbers, which makes it easier to count half a minute or a quarter of a minute.
So what about seconds? Well the same person that split hours into minutes (small parts) split it again into second minutes, the 2nd small part. Nowadays we just say seconds.
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