Abstract
A CORRESPONDENT has sent an inquiry as to the origin of the division of a day into twenty-four hours, each divided into sixty minutes, and these into sixty seconds. The preliminary observation may be made that the numbers five and twelve are both marked out naturally by the fingers on our hands and the months in the year; it is not surprising that their product should be selected as a convenient number. Sixty is also twice the number of days in a month, the length of the average lunar month being a little less than thirty days, and that of the average solar month a little more than thirty. John Williams, on p. 17 of his “Chinese Observations of Comets”, describes the Chinese reckoning of time by cycles of sixty years and smaller cycles of sixty days, the same system of names being used for the individual years and days of a sixty-fold cycle. Possibly they used the divisor sixty again in forming smaller time-intervals. It is, however, probable that our present subdivisions of time are derived from countries less remote than China. The independence of ancient China from western nations is shown by the completely different division of the stars into constellations that was adopted there.
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Number 60 in Time Measurements. Nature 131, 299 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/131299c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/131299c0