Looking back over the day, I must confess that I tried to post something today here about six times. You know, prepare and publish one of our drafts. Regular interruptions kept it from happening. Urggh. Frustrating.
But anyhoo, my repeated attempts to complete that specific task made me acutely aware of time. Time measured in sixes, twelves and twenty-fours. Historically, our time system (probably) dates back to the Sumerian civilization … so, yeah, it’s been around a while. (Ok, I might have made up the Sumerian connection, but I am pretty sure that our 24-hour day system dates back to antiquity. Can one of our readers help me out here?)
There have been attempts to change the system — a prominent effort during the French Revolution tried to convert the day to 10 hours (or something like that) and even developed a watch to boot — but for some reason good old number 24 stuck around.
It’s kind of weird, isn’t it, the whole concept of dividing something into 24?
24 is actually a brilliant number into which to divide something. It is devisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and itself (of course). You can easily divide a day by each of these factors (e.g. 3 shifts of 8 hours).
Some may have come from the # cycles of the moon in a year. 12 hours for day and 12 for night?
Actually, not everyone has used or wanted to use the 24-hour format. A more recent time-tracking method was developed and promoted by the Swatch company starting in 1998.
Swatch Internet Time (aka Beat Time) was an interesting concept (or so I thought), but one doomed from the start.
You can read about it on Wikipedia here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
And before you ask how I knew of this…. let’s just say I used to have a rather intense lust for time-telling devices.
It was the Egyptians. Later, the Babylonians used base 60 and had “decimals”, but didn’t “get” repeating decimals. It’s why circles have 360 degrees, hours have 60 minutes and minutes have 60 seconds.
The reason we have 360 degrees in a circle was because we have 365 days in a year. Early astronomy gave us 365 degrees in a circle which was later shortened to 360 for ease of division.
@ Jordan,
In your first comment, you mention that 24 is easily divided into 3 shifts of 8. While that’s true enough, I wonder if that seems elegant because of our familiarity with the 24-hour day. What if we had grown up with a 20-hour day? Perhaps two 10-hour shifts or four 5-hour shifts would seem more natural.
I think a big part of what seems so right about the 24-hour day is that it is so ingrained into our ways of life.
Not my point. I was saying that 24 had 6 factors. 20 has only 4 (2, 4, 5, 10). The next number to have 6 or more factors is 36 with 7 factors (2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18).
@ Jordan,
Oh, okay. So you were highlighting the functional versatility of 24 over its elegance as such. Gotcha. I agree with you then.
But functional versatility is elegant. 🙂
f(x) = z² + c
Need I say more?