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Who Invented The 60-Minute Hour And Why It Was Genius

Every time you glance at a clock, you are using a mathematical idea invented more than 4,000 years ago, and most people have never stopped to wonder why. The reason there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour has nothing to do with modern science and everything to do with the ancient Babylonians, who built their entire number system around the number 60. They chose it for a reason that still holds up beautifully: 60 can be divided evenly by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30, making it far more useful for calculations than the base-10 system we use today for almost everything else. In a world without calculators, being able to split an hour into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths and sixths without getting messy fractions was an enormous practical advantage for merchants, astronomers and engineers alike.

The path from Babylonian math to your watch face ran through several more ancient cultures. Greek astronomers later used this same base-60 system to divide circles into 360 degrees for mapping the sky, and when they subdivided those degrees into smaller parts for measuring latitude and longitude, they called the first division the partes minutae primae, meaning the first small part, which gave us the word minute. The second subdivision became the partes minutae secundae, the second small part, which is where the word second comes from. Meanwhile, the ancient Egyptians contributed the 24-hour day by dividing daylight and darkness into 12 parts each, using sundials by day and stars by night. The French tried to replace the whole system during their revolution with a clean decimal version featuring 10-hour days, but the world rejected it, and the 4,000-year-old Babylonian logic has held its ground ever since, ticking away on every device you own.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260320-the-ancient-reason-there-are-60-minutes-in-an-hour-and-60-seconds-in-a-minute

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