Skip to content
  • Happy Health
  • Happy Mindset
  • Animal Wonders
  • About Us
    • Team
  • Subscribe
Menu
  • Happy Health
  • Happy Mindset
  • Animal Wonders
  • About Us
    • Team
  • Subscribe
Happy News

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

PrevPreviousArtists And Creators Celebrate As OpenAI Shuts Down Controversial AI Video Platform Sora
NextScience Just Explained Why Music Makes You Feel Closer To PeopleNext

Recent Articles

Happy News

The Happiest Countries On Earth Ranked For 2026

March 23, 2026

Every year, researchers survey people across 140 countries and ask them to rate their own lives, and every year the results reveal something worth paying attention to. The 2026 World Happiness Report has just been released, and for the ninth time in the past ten years, Finland landed at the

Read More
Happy News

Human Footprints Found That Rewrite The Story Of Our Origins

March 23, 2026

In the middle of what is now one of the world’s most forbidding deserts, researchers have found something that should not be there by any previous understanding of human history: the footprints of a small group of our ancestors, preserved in the dried bed of an ancient lake in Saudi

Read More
Happy News

Golf Course Sinkhole Reveals A Secret Wine Cellar

March 23, 2026

When a groundskeeper at an English golf club spotted a small sinkhole near the 13th hole, he figured it was just a collapsed drain and set about digging it out. As the hole got deeper, it kept opening up beneath him, and eventually he found himself crawling through a small

Read More
« Previous Next »
  • Privacy Notice
  • Accessibility Notice
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Unsubscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Privacy Notice
  • Accessibility Notice
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Unsubscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2026 HappyNews.