I’m not going to apologize for this totally geek moment. I found this article about time fascinating. I’ve always wondered why we used 24 hours and 60 min/sec increments, but never bothered to research it.
I can remember as a child spending hours trying to develop a workable metric time system. 10 hours a day? Too few. 20? (10 day, 10 night) Not really metric. 100? Ridiculous.
Thanks to documented evidence of the Egyptians’ use of sundials, most historians credit them with being the first civilization to divide the day into smaller parts. The first sundials were simply stakes placed in the ground that indicated time by the length and direction of the resulting shadow. As early as 1500 B.C., the Egyptians had developed a more advanced sundial. A T-shaped bar placed in the ground, this instrument was calibrated to divide the interval between sunrise and sunset into 12 parts. This division reflected Egypt’s use of the duodecimal system–the importance of the number 12 is typically attributed either to the fact that it equals the number of lunar cycles in a year or the number of finger joints on each hand (three in each of the four fingers, excluding the thumb), making it possible to count to 12 with the thumb. The next-generation sundial likely formed the first representation of what we now call the hour. Although the hours within a given day were approximately equal, their lengths varied during the year, with summer hours being much longer than winter hours.
I also found it fascinating about the Egyptian duodecimal system.
Back in the 70’s when Schoolhouse Rock was airing, they had a multiplication segment on base 12. They posed that we use base 10 because we have 10 fingers but that an alien with 12 might use a base 12 system (inventing 3 new numbers to replace 10, 11 and 12, which they called – if I recall correctly, “douâ€, “dec†and “el.â€)
What’s interesting is that it firmly fixed in my brain the notion that it was basically impossible for primitive humans to have naturally developed a non-decimal system. Yet, here we have those clever Egyptians and a base-12 system. I could see how they easily could have had a base-8 system instead if they’d only used the two knuckles actually on the fingers and not the one at the base. Would naturally using an octal system have made the development of digital computers simpler? I wonder.