00:00have you ever wondered why your day is split into 24 hours and your minutes into 60 seconds
00:05instead of a nice clean number like 100 we live in a world built on base 10 because we have
00:1110
00:11fingers and 10 toes but when it comes to time we are still living by the rules of ancient civilizations
00:17from 6 000 years ago so the first big question is if we have 10 fingers why didn't the ancients
00:23just count to 10 the answer is that they did use their hands but they were much more clever about
00:29it than we are today ancient babylonians and sumerians use their thumb to count the three
00:34segments on each of their other four fingers which gets you to 12 on just one hand then they would
00:40hold up one finger on their other hand to mark that they had finished a set of 12 and since
00:45that hand
00:46has five fingers 12 times 5 equals 60. this allowed them to count all the way to 60 using just
00:53two
00:53hands creating what we call a base 60 system you might then ask is counting on your knuckles really
00:59the only reason we use 60. actually there is a massive mathematical benefit that makes 60 way
01:05better than 10 for measuring things the number 60 is what mathematicians call highly composite meaning
01:11it is divisible by a ton of different numbers while 10 can only be divided evenly by 2 and 5
01:1760 can be
01:18divided by 1 2 3 4 5 6 10 12 15 20 and 30. this was a huge deal for
01:25ancient merchants and astronomers
01:27because it means they could easily calculate a half a third a quarter or even a fifth of an hour
01:33without
01:34ending up with massive fractions or repeating decimals but wait if they loved 60 so much why does our day
01:40have 24 hours instead of 60. this part of the story takes us to ancient egypt about 3500 years ago
01:46the
01:47egyptians used sundials to divide the daylight into 12 parts and then use the appearance of 12 special stars
01:53to track 12 parts of the night since they had 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night we
01:58ended up
01:59either 24 hour cycle originally these hours were not even a fixed length summer hours were actually
02:05longer than winter hours because they depended on how much sunlight there was so how did we eventually
02:10get down to the level of minutes and seconds we can thank greek astronomers and mathematicians
02:16are dead they realized that you could fit six equilateral triangles inside a circle and since
02:21they used babylonian base 60 system they gave each triangle a value of 60 which created the 360 degree
02:29circle which still used in geometry later on famous thinkers like hipparchus and tolmy divided those
02:35degrees into 60 smaller parts called minutes and then divided those into even smaller secondary parts
02:40seconds it actually took over a thousand years for these geographical measurements to be applied to
02:46our clocks mostly after mechanical clocks and pendulums were invented and could finally track such tiny
02:52bits of time accurately at this point you might be thinking this all sounds really complicated so has
02:57anyone ever tried to fix it and make it based then yes the french actually tried to do exactly that
03:03during the french revolution in 1793 they introduced french revolutionary time which was a 10 hour day
03:09with 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute it made time related math much easier like knowing
03:17that 80 percent of your day was over at exactly the 8 hour however this new system was a total
03:22disaster
03:23because every person already had a well established habit of telling time the old way and replacing every
03:29clock in the country was way too expensive people were so confused that the french government gave up on it
03:35after only 17 months in the end we still use base 60 because it is mathematically elegant and incredibly
03:41durable even though we have switched to base 10 for almost everything else like our money and our metric
03:47measurements the ancient system of 60 remains the universal language of time it is a system that connects
03:53us directly to the star waters of babylon and the sun liars of egypt every single time we look at
03:59our
03:59phones to check the time so next time you are waiting for a 60 second timer to go off just
04:05remember that
04:05you are participating in a 6 000 year old tradition
