It comes from the ancient Babylonian numeration system which had base The reason for the choice of such a base is simplicity of calculation: 60 is divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20, Much more convenient than base 10, whose only justification is the number of fingers on both hands.
Then with the spread of clocks, it started to be used in daily life. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.
Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why historically the hour was divided into 60 minutes and when it had started? Asked 8 months ago. The Egyptians had a system of 36 star groups called 'decans' — chosen so that on any night one decan rose 40 minutes after the previous one. Amazingly, such tables have been found inside the lids of coffins, presumably so that the dead could also tell the time.
In the Egyptian system, the length of the day-time and night-time hours were unequal and varied with the seasons. The subdivision of hours and minutes into 60 comes from the ancient Babylonians who had a predilection for using numbers to the base Lomb says it's likely that the Babylonians were interested in because that was their estimate for the number of days in a year.
Their adoption of a base 60 system was probably allowed them to make complex calculations using fractions. The ancient Chinese used a dual time system where they divided the day into 12 so-called, 'double hours', originally with the middle of the first double hour being at midnight.
They also had a separate system in which a day was divided into equal parts called 'ke', that are sometimes translated as 'mark' into English. Because of this inconvenience, much later on, in the year of our era, the number of ke in a day was reduced to 96," says Lomb. While many cultures had their own calendars, there doesn't appear to be evidence for equivalent methods for keeping time.
In , the Swiss watch company Swatch introduced the concept of a decimal Internet Time in which the day is divided into 'beats' so that each beat is equal to 1 minute The beats were denoted by the symbol, so that, for example, denotes a time period equal to six hours. I think that I am safe in stating that there will be no change from the present system of time measurement in the foreseeable future.
Keeping time While our units for measuring time seem to be here to stay, the way we measure time has changed significantly over the centuries. Disclaimer: Fahrenheit is the most annoying and nonsensical of imperial measurement scales to me, so I am biased against it.
The natural response is of course we live close to freezing! We just use decimal degrees, e. That said, and as an European, if had to stop using one unit of measure it would certain be the Celsius scale. ArbitraryLimits on Jan 15, parent prev next [—]. IMO the reason why Americans prefer Farenheit to Celsius is that the 0 and points correspond to roughly the limits of common outdoor temperatures, rather than water's state changes.
Pretty much the same argument for miles per hour vs kilometers per hour - mph is all anyone's ever going to go during a normal day. From another American with a physics background. Let's face it -- people have a strong preference for whatever system they are used to.
There's extremely strong inertia, and efforts to try and justify one system over the other are not especially effective. In theory I'd prefer a timekeeping system that had its base unit in terms of the smallest discrete unit of time basically planck time and let everything else arise naturally from that.
It is going to make space travel a much bigger hassle, to say the least. Does it also peeve you that the decimal system is based on the number of fingers we have? I can only assume you're being facetious -- I can't see any practical reason for wanting a system of measurements that isn't designed around the world we all live in. You seem to have missed the convenience of secondary definitions using SI. You can't do the same with calories, miles, horsepower, and other Imperial units.
If you find it easier to work with base 12 than base 10, you are not like most of the people. I don't buy it. On the topic of metric vs. Someone on Jan 15, parent prev next [—].
To cipher on 12, pick a hand and assign the values 1 to 12 to each finger joint so that the tip of the index finger is one, the middle joint of the index finger is Use the thumb as pointer to a number. Add and subtract by moving your thumb as you count. Cipher on 24 by using each joint on both hands. Cipher on 60 by using one hand to cipher on The other to cipher on 5 in the traditional way but value each finger as Example: Base joint of pinky on right hand and ring finger of left hand is To get the full Babylonian number system allow the exponent to float based on context.
It's really just an extension of the move from ciphering on 12 to ciphering on Exercises: 1. Short version. They don't really know. Yet another headline phrased as a question without a clear answer in the article body A slight rephrasing of the headline allows us to apply Betteridge's law[1]: "Have we solved the mystery of why a minute is divided into 60 seconds?
Vecrios on Jan 16, root parent prev next [—]. There is so much interesting information in the article that people really forget what they came for, the answer to the proposed title question. Personally, I wasn't upset at all. I really liked the article although it had a deceiving title. How else would you have an article referring to an open question phrased? DougWebb on Jan 15, root parent next [—]. Now you can waste your time reading it.
That's not fair at all. I enjoyed reading about ancient timekeeping and the theories that powered them. I had no idea how they tracked time at night, for example; now I do. Regarding the 12 hours division, they do suggest it is from "the number of finger joints on each hand three in each of the four fingers, excluding the thumb ".
Interesting history lesson about the Egyptian's use of the duodecimal system. I believe the last argument is understated: one big advantage of base 12 over base 10 is division by 3. This offers many ways of dividing a time interval into several sub-intervals of identical duration. For base 60, this intensifies: as mentioned in the post, 60 is the smallest number divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. This gives tremendous flexibility for dividing a time interval.
Duodecimal counting still persists in some places in inches-per-foot and in the UK until in the "pounds, shillings and pence" old-money system. It's interesting to me that both duodecimal and decimal counting are recommended as being easy to calculate with.
The benefits of decimal come from our using base for other purposes. I guess the best of all possible worlds would be to use duodecimal for all units including our normal number system. Then we'd get the ease of use of modern base units plus the better factorisation of duodecimal. But we'd still have an impedance mismatch with the binary powers. I don't see the point of a duodecimal system of units when a base 10 system is much more elegant.
Fractions are a hack. As an aside, I wonder how technology affects the units or systems we use. I guess binary might be an example of that. How is base 10 more elegant than base 12? The elegant thing is that in duodecimal all of those are non-repeating fractions :. Base 12 is far more elegant than base 10, but the conversions cost make the conversion to French units look cheap--and then we'd need to convert all our units to some sort of French units mark II.
For day-to-day use, it makes sense to use a system where you can express your age in years in one or two digits rather than five to seven. Hence, a hexadecimal system might be preferable as a representation.
Fractions are a hack? Much elegance! This is also a good argument for switching to base 12 for normal every-day counting. One interesting thing I heard once - a journalist was discussing the merits of counting in base 12 with someone whose society already adopted this method. When the journalist asked how we would teach kids to count with their fingers, the answer was simple - use the divisions created by your knuckles! It would mess with everyone but I think there's a pretty strong argument for base But it's still cool!
I have seen a lot of numberphile's videos but not this one! Thanks for the link. I'm pretty sure my flatmate told me the story and he watches numberphile too so you're almost certainly right either way :P. It's like "ex-acerbate". It doesn't mean "even more so" in a good way.
Just thought you'd like to know. Thank you! As you may have spotted, I am not a native English speaker, and I was confused by "false friends". The verb "to exacerbate" comes from French verb "exacerber", which means "to make more intense or more acute ".
My post has been edited to reflect your comment. While we're picking nits, You could have replaced "exacerbated" with "magnified" in the original sentence. However, they are considered to come from Proto-Germanic ainlif and twalif respectively one left and two left , both of which were decimal. Interestingly enough, in French you find the hexadecimal system: dix, onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf.
In Latin seventeen is septendecim, and sixteen is sedecim fifteen is quindecim. Language drift has shortened most French words from their Latin ancestors, and the same goes for the numbers for I presume that the early French chose to use dix-sept when their words for septendecim and sedecim started to sound the same. As for dix-huit and dix-neuf, the Romans counted down from twenty; duodeviginti two-down-from-twenty is eighteen and undeviginti one-down-from-twenty.
So it probably made more sense to the early French to say dis-huit and dix-neuf instead. But one interesting thing about French numbers that you have missed is that it possess a vestigial remnant of the vigesimal base number system of the Celtics, where 80 is quatre-vignts four-twentys to the French, and 90 is quatre-vignts-dix. This actually goes for beyond that! Indeed, 80 is 4 times 20, hence "four-twenty" quatre-vingt, without the "s" at the end.
Interestingly enough, French-speaking Belgians use the regular forms: 70 is "septante", 80 is "octante", and 90 is "nonante". Is that actually a vestige of a hexadec system, or just a strange quirk? Note that 2 sounds similar to 12, 3 to 13, and so on. That implies there's a relationship between those numbers, which only exists in decimal. Dutch too: tien, elf, twaalf dertien, veertien, vijftien, zestien. After the french revolution there was a short period 3 years when the French had decimal time.
It didn't catch on because that meant the workers had day workweeks instead of 7. It has nothing to do with how one day is divided, it's the calendar. There was a proposition for a day of 10 hours, each having minutes, each having seconds. It was only official and mandatory for a few months, however [2]. Edit: the one with 1M seconds a day was only an earlier draft version that never made it into law. Aardwolf on Jan 15, root parent next [—].
I wonder if that's an error, 10 hours, minutes each, with each minute seconds would mean 1 million seconds a day. Further on the article says there are k such seconds a day though. You are completely right, I was confused by the first proposition. See edit. Also, the weird thing was that, although they decided that an hour is divided in ten "parts", and each one of those in ten, and so one I wonder how people managed to get a hang of this mess It has, the french went full on with the decimal system back then.
And they didn't stop at the date and time, they also did away with all other measurements for size, weight and distance, but also things like the feudal system. Must have been confusing times! Two9A on Jan 15, root parent prev next [—]. But that'd just be pedantry, of course. From what I've read, the reason is simple: Base 12 is a number that can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6. This makes it a much better fit than base 10, which can only be divided by 2 and 5. Base As good as base 12 is, it misses division by 5.
So what do you do to make it divisible? Now you can divide an hour in 2 parts of 30 minutes each, 3 parts of 20 minutes, 4 parts of 15 minutes, 5 parts of 12, or 6 parts of 10 minutes.
This also means that if for example you want to divide a job in 3 shifts, every shift will be 8 hours, not 3, hours or similar, what you would get in a base10 system.
I mean, the stars and the gods and the tip or our fingers might be also a justification, but I think those were rationalized after the fact. Base 60 has many advantages, but bare in mind that this is dated almost years ago.
When people developed language and started counting, they would need something to keep track and help them go from one number to the other, so the finger tip theory is actually quite accurate. I find the factor theory much more plausible for years ago than the finger tip theory.
Why are there 24 beers in a case? This would have been as true then as now. VLM on Jan 15, prev next [—].
Aside from previously discussed, the pendulum length is convenient, and water drop "clocks" are fairly reasonable at one drop per second. Also people can count one digit per second pretty easily if the point is to cook or process something for 45 seconds or whatever.
That would be tough if the second were times smaller than it is. Its a numerical base with two "digits" not just one digit.
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