Why There Are 60 Minutes in an Hour
Tuesday, 2026/03/31260 words4 minutes245 reads
In October 1793, revolutionary France embarked on an ambitious experiment to decimalise time, dividing the day into 10 hours of 100 decimal minutes each. Despite considerable effort to convert clocks and implement the system, it proved extraordinarily impractical. The experiment isolated France diplomatically, caused widespread confusion, and was abandoned after merely 17 months—a stark contrast to the successful adoption of metric measurements for distance and currency.
Our current temporal framework originates with the Sumerians, an ancient Mesopotamian civilization flourishing from approximately 5300-1940BC. They developed a sophisticated sexagesimal (base-60) number system, driven by practical needs for agricultural record-keeping and taxation. The system's mathematical elegance is remarkable: 60 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60, making calculations far simpler than base-10 systems.
The Babylonians inherited and refined this system, applying it to astronomical calculations. They subdivided their "beru" (double-hours) into 30 "ush" and further into 60 "ninda," establishing the conceptual foundation for minutes and seconds. Meanwhile, ancient Egyptians pioneered the division of day and night into 12 hours each, possibly influenced by their zodiacal system or finger-counting methods.
These traditions converged in the Hellenistic world, particularly in Alexandria, where Greek scholars adopted Babylonian astronomical methods wholesale to maintain continuity with existing observational data. This synthesis persisted through millennia, though minutes and seconds only entered common usage when mechanical precision improved sufficiently in the 18th century. Today, despite the second's redefinition using atomic caesium-133 transitions, we remain bound to an ancient numerical legacy—one so deeply embedded that revolutionary attempts at reform have consistently failed.
