Why are the clocks like this? Why do they have “12” above them and then the numbers go to these locations? And most of all: why do the hands of the clock rotate clockwise and not – forgive the excess – in the opposite direction? The truth is, there’s a reason the design of our watches follows these patterns. Something that has a lot to do with our history, lights, shadows, and above all geography.

anyway let’s measure time. The Culture Teacher spoke about this recently. in a twitter thread He reviewed our history while measuring time. Over the centuries we have seen how water, sand and even candlesticks have been used to measure time precisely.

Hello Sun, how good you are to me. However, the oldest method of measuring time is the sundial. It was “sufficient” to place an elongated object perpendicular to the ground and then check how time flies thanks to the shadow it casts.

gnomon. The reality was of course a little more complicated. The elongated object took its shape and name (“gnomon”, from Greek γνώμων: “guide” or “teacher”) and had the property of being inclined at an angle equal to latitude with respect to the horizontal plane. sundial where the object is located. This is exactly why every dwarf is different.

But if your viewpoint is the Northern Hemisphere, the earth appears to rotate counterclockwise. pic.twitter.com/8EAyEYXtta

— Culture Teacher (@kultüreltutor) 21 December 2022

perspectives. The truth is, it’s a matter of point of view whether we tell the clock hands to spin in that direction or in the opposite direction. Earth’s rotation is always from west to east. However, if our point of view is from the northern hemisphere, the Earth appears to rotate counterclockwise, while from the southern hemisphere it appears to rotate clockwise.

shadows. The key point is this: When you’re in the northern hemisphere, the sun appears to be moving across the sky in the opposite direction, “clockwise.” And so are the shadows it casts, including the shadows of time clocks that “rotate” in the familiar sense of time.

And so, given that the Northern Hemisphere rotates counterclockwise, the sun appears to be moving across the sky in the opposite direction, that is, clockwise…

…with their shadows.

Therefore, sundials in the Northern Hemisphere naturally rotate clockwise. pic.twitter.com/7xW1CznxZa

— Culture Teacher (@kultüreltutor) 21 December 2022

who invents decides. The mechanical clock was invented in Europe, that is, in the northern hemisphere, and so it is only natural that its creators decided to turn the hands in the direction they see on the sundial.

And numbers, what? For exactly the same reason, the numbers are placed like this: noon indicates “north” at the top of the sundial and mechanical clocks, and the hours are distributed clockwise.

back clocks. In the southern hemisphere, the opposite happens: noon is “south” and the shadow moves counterclockwise, which makes the numbers “reverse”.

Perspective. Once again, it’s all a matter of perspective: If the mechanical clock were created in the southern hemisphere, we would normally assume that the clockwise and counterclockwise directions are opposite.

In fact, there are visible examples of precisely this “counterclockwise” design and operation, such as the sundial in Perth (Australia) or the clock on the facade of the Bolivian Congress.

Time continues to surprise us. The truth is that our particular obsession with time is part of our history. It is not always measured in the same way, and indeed the French found days to be 10 hours and hours to 100 minutes.

In 1998, Swatch tried to enforce its own decimal system for time with the Swatch Internet Clock, dividing the time into “.beats”. Facebook created its own time unit in 2018, movies and computer scientists want to know that Unix time has always been there.

In the meantime, we’re currently trying to decide whether to terminate the timeshift in one go, but what we’re going to do is eliminate the annoying leap second. Good thing we know that days are 24 hours. Except when the wind blows.

Picture: Swag Photography