How did a day end up being 24 hours with an hour being 60 minutes and a minute being 60 seconds?

Similar questions: day end 24 hours hour 60 minutes minute seconds.

It began with ancient Babylonian astronomy In ancient Babylonia, it was necessary to have an accurate calendar so that the people could plan for the seasons, planting at the right time amid the expectation of the seasonal changes. Their calendar was based on the location of the sun in the sky, so they needed a way to establish measurements of the circular heavens. They selected 360 because it was large enough to provide enough marking points and 360 is evenly divisible by so many numbers.

This made the computations much easier. The number 360 is also very close to the number of solar days it takes the Earth to complete a revolution around the sun (a year). 24 is also evenly divisible by a large number of whole numbers and the division of a day into 24 parts (hours) made the parts big enough so that they could be used to measure larger intervals.60 was selected for the smaller parts once again because it evenly divides 360 and 60 is divisible by so many whole numbers.

For example, 24 can be divided into halves, thirds, sixths, eighths, twelves and twentyfourths, sixty in even more ways. Charlie Ashbacher Sources: A lifetime of following science .

Because the Babylonians based their number system on twelve instead of ten The ancient Babylonians are responsible for this. They were among the earliest astronomers and based their number system on twelve instead of ten. 24 is twice twelve and 60 is five times twelve.

We also get 360 degrees in a circle from them. They were able to calculate that the year had 365+ days, and rounded the number down to 360 so they could divide by 12 (30 x 12) . As a result, one degree is close to the distance the sun appears to move in the sky, with reference to the stars, in one day.

They probably liked the fact that the 60 x 60 = 3600 seconds in an hour was like the 360 degrees in the sky. There has been at least one alternate ways of dividing the day. I recently saw a decimal sundial from the time of the French Revolution (it is in the Napoleon exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.) The sundial had decimal hours and minutes, introduced by the revolutionary French along with the metric system in 1793.

The day had 10 hours-- each hour was divided into 100 minutes and each minute into 100 seconds. The "metric day" thus had 100,000 seconds, instead of the 86,400 of our "Babylonian Day." This form of telling time was attempted for about three years, but proved to be too confusing and was dropped.

Fortunately they did not drop the metric system and only the United States still uses the archaic and difficult English system of measure. I don’t know why the Babylonians were so fixated on twelve. They had the same five fingers on their hands that we do.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time ; http://www.mfa.org/napoleon/ .

Those numbers are easily divisible by 2,3,4,8 It is handy to have multiples of 12, so you can work in half, thirds, quarters etc. 60 is also divisible by 5, 6, and of course 12.

" "Why are there 24 hours in a day?" "Motorola Q phone here,The battery will last a good 24 hours,but if I use the internet it will die in minutes..?" "There are 24 hours in a day, and 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not!" "how much does it cost to run a ceiling fan 24 hours/day?

" "Say this world is about to end, and we all have 24 hours left, what was the last thing that you are going to do? " "When did 'time' begin?I.e. Seconds, minutes, hours, etc. " "How many hours are in one day?

I only have 24 in mine.Is it different, perhaps, in different time zones?

There are 24 hours in a day, and 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not!

I only have 24 in mine. Is it different, perhaps, in different time zones?

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.