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Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#11

Post by nmc »

phaemon wrote: post #9
nmc wrote: post #2

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 f…

> For base 60, this is exacerbated Sorry to nitpick, but "exacerbate" is to make worse . 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.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#12

Post by VLM »

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 100 times smaller than it is.

Its a numerical base with two "digits" not just one digit. So its not just 60 sec/min its 60 min/hr and if you arbitrarily decided to use 2 for both, or 1000 for both, you don't get multiple levels that result in the second being useful. If you used 2 for both aka binary then each new-second would be 900 of our seconds long, thats useless. If you used 1000 for both then a new-second would be about 3 ms which might be handy for power EEs (not the RF guys...) but seems a bit inconvenient for the ancients.

One curiosity from the chem lab from decades ago was measuring to a milligram isn't all that challenging and a candle burned about a mg of wax per second (or was it a tenth?) anyway I'm well aware the gram is pretty recent, but the point is your stereotypical apothecary type in the ancient world should have been able to build a "mg capable" balance pan scale or at least approach it, so weighing a candle before and after would be a not too awful way to measure time and the least they could measure might have been around a second.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#13

Post by pygy_ »

nmc wrote: post #11
phaemon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For base 60, this is exacerbated Sorry to nitpick, but "exacerbate" is to make worse . 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. "it intensifies" sounds a bit weird too.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#14

Post by jakub_g »

yardie wrote: post #10

I read this book about the history of numbers. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0747597162/ref=oh_details... The book author declares the Babylonians had a base 60 system. some native cultures have none at all. (well 1 and many)

Another interesting read I can recommend is this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Universal-History-Numbers-Georges-Ifra...

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#15

Post by jbert »

nmc wrote: post #2

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 f…

Duodecimal counting still persists in some places in inches-per-foot and in the UK until 1971 in the "pounds, shillings and pence" old-money system. (12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound).

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-10 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-10 units plus the better factorisation of duodecimal.

(But we'd still have an impedance mismatch with the binary powers. The KB/KiB split wouldn't go away).

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#19

Post by eloisant »

dirktheman wrote: post #8

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 10-day workweeks instead of 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar As a result, decimal clocks from that era are very rare and highly sought after!

It has nothing to do with how one day is divided, it's the calendar.

Re: Why is a minute divided into 60 seconds, an hour into 60 minutes?

#20

Post by Two9A »

eloisant wrote: post #19
dirktheman wrote: post #8

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 10-day workweeks instead of 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar As a result, decimal clocks from that era are very rare and highly sought after!

It has nothing to do with how one day is divided, it's the calendar.

"Decimal date and time" is probably the more proper phraseology. But that'd just be pedantry, of course.
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