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Clocks were sundials.
If you can see the time, it's not night.
100% This.
Also, being an evolution of sundials is the reason all analog clocks move their hands in the same direction.
*Being evolution of sundials located on the northern hemisphere.
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So you're saying clockwise can also be called sundialwise?
Or just sunwise
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I was answering about the Northern/Southern hemisphere logic of this... and realised that it depends if the sundial is vertical in a wall (facing South in the Northern hemisphere) or horizontal (facing the zenith/sky)... today you can easily find those wall sundials in many monumental buildings (at least these seem to me more common than the others) and the shadow is casted counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere, so not sure if the clockwise sense was locked by sundials... also in the Southern hemisphere logic flips completely.
in the Southern hemisphere logic flips completely.
In the southern hemisphere they think Australia is suitable for human life.
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I present to you, illuminated clocks!
crowd gasps MY UNIVERSE IS COLLAPSING the crowd starts screaming and lighting things on fire
...and then they noticed: "Damn, we could have lit everything on fire and seen our clocks in the night time millenia ago!"
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Your sundial still isn't showing time.
It's showing a time
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AM/PM time is another thing that needs to sink with the USA, just like the Imperial system and Fahrenheit.
EU fella here. I'm strongly pro-Metric and yet don't see a problem with 12-hour time. 24-hour is kind of clumsy to use in informal speech or chat/text, but I would use it in all other instances.
I use 24h all the time when speaking, never got strange gazes for doing so. And I never remember which one is midday and which is midnight on the 12-hour time.
Well... it depends on the language too - although I'm not a native English speaker, I would use 12-hour in spoken English too (like I would in my native Bulgarian) - often without even appending "AM" or "PM" because it would be obvious from the context.
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I still don't know why everyone doesn't just use the 24-hour clock. It's so much easier.
It's like someone had doubts people could count much past 12, so just had them do that twice. Or maybe Big Clock didn't want to manufacture 24 hour faces and sold the lie.
As for the clock face, a 12 hour face is much easier to read at a glance or from a distance.
It’s like someone had doubts people could count much past 12
More like the people who invented a lot of shit used base 12.
Things restarting at 12, is because the thing is so old, it predates base 10.
Like, pick a language, count to thirteen:
Ein, zwei, drei, fire, funf, sechs, seben, acht, neun, zein, elf, zwolf, dreizein...
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen...
Notice how 11 and 12 aren't one-teen and two-teen?
On each hand is 4 sets of 3 knuckles, touch your thumb to each knuckle and your finger counting on one hand higher than we can with two. Pretty sure there's some pretty neat math tricks with their method too, almost like built in abacus.
But all this is off memory.
Ein, zwei, drei, fire, funf, sechs, seben, acht, neun, zein, elf, zwolf, dreizein…
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen…
Yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi, kuusi, seitsemän, kahdeksan, yhdeksän, kymmenen, yksitoista, kaksitoista, kolmetoista...
(though, notice that our words for "eight" and "nine" are derived from those for "two" and "one". We used base 8 before migrating to Europe and applying the local standard. Then it was "two left until the new ten and "one left until the new ten"
With base 8 you can use your fingers to count up to 24 because you can use your thumbs for marking the "tens". Or to 32, but that already takes a little bit of an effort because from my perspective your left thumb is on the right.)
But yeah, base 10 is the worst. 12 can be divided by 3 without problems. And base 8 allows counting far higher with just fingers.
Still better than Danish...
/s
But yeah thanks! When I saw it was Finns I checked the Danes because they're always doing their own thing, they go by 20s, so tens alternate "half 20s".
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It's not called Big Clock, it's called Big Ben /j
Um akshually, Big Ben is the bell. The clock is just “The Great Clock of Westminster.” And the tower itself is called “Elizabeth Tower.”
(But everyone just calls the whole thing Big Ben.)
Big Clock
looks at London and it's big clock you, have been, REVEALED
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Hmmm 4 20
I've never seen one of these in person. Only in pictures.
beautiful
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Hey, where are my fellow ISO-8601 fans?
REPRESENT.
Even in Canada I grew up with non-American time, thanks to German parents, and knew of AM/PM only via analog clocks and use outside of the home. I remember confusing the heck out of an elementary school teacher by giving an afternoon/evening time in proper units. She had to do the math (calculators still being hella rare in those days) to convert out of PM in order to see if I was correct or not.
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I took a nap one time on a spring afternoon and woke up at 6:00. Only I wasn't sure if it was afternoon or I slept all night until morning. Weird feeling.
I did this recently. I woke up at "sunrise", had a cup of coffee, and it started getting darker outside. I was very confused for a few minutes.
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Although the 12 hours aren't divided in day/night are they?
And depending on where/when you're at, it can easily be light out at seven and seven, even in the same day.
What the 12 hour clock does well is to track when the sun goes up or down relative to the only convenient time marker: midday. It also does so in a pleasingly symmetrical way: it gets light and dark at about 8, rather than 4 hours before and 8 hours after midday.
I'd argue if you want to track time, rather than record the ends of daylight, a linear scale for the whole day makes more sense. If it should be reset daily or not, be divisible by 24, 86400, 100, 1000000, a second or whatever is mostly a choice of convention. If you have constant access to a clock, Internet time seems convenient, for humans without clocks we use daylight and units like hours and 5-minute increments.
For that the 24 hour clock seems simple and convenient, although it would be nice to be able to calibrate without a watch (is it two or three hours before midday? How many more hours until wake-up time?). 24 hour time isn't perfect, but it's much better adapted to modern life than the 12 hour clock.
12 clock is easier to read at a distance.
Digital clocks handle 24 pretty well
Wow, am I the only person on lemmy to grow up before any digital clocks, where all the clocks were 12 hours ? Yes, yes I am
There are 24 hour analog clocks dude.
Of course, they exist. But, they are extremely uncommon. Maybe you see them in military context? In sixty years, I've never seen one except in a picture, and maybe a movie. Not like a digital clock, where on nearly every one you just change a setting.
Dude.
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12h clocks are 24h clocks if you just keep counting.
Probably because it was invented well after we mostly lived in caves. 🤷♂️
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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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