Why is 12 hour time even taught? Wouldn’t it just be easier to remember 13:00 instead of 1:00pm?
In: Mathematics
Clocks, for about 600 years, were principally mechanical and had what amounts to an analog display: a circular dial.
Making clocks which cycled through in twelve hours was easier, the twelve-hour dial was easier to read, and everyone *knew* whether it was morning or night so there was really no difficulty with them.
There were, from time to time, other sorts of clocks built: some which had 24-hour dials, some of which showed weekdays, some of which ran counterclockwise. But most clocks worked the same way.
Now that it is cheaper – at least in the sorts of quantities we produce – to make electronic clocks with character-based displays, the twelve-hour format may well die out.
Give it another hundred years. We’ll see.
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