Why is the day split into 24 hours? Why not ten or fifteen or any other number? Clearly there must be some link between the duodecimal system that we see in imperial measures but then why not just twelve hours in the day?
A quick investigation sheds some light on the subject and suggests that at one time it was accepted that there were twelve hours of daylight and twelve of darkness. This meant that summertime hours were longer than wintertime hours.
An alternative suggestion is that there were ten hours of day light each day and an hour of twilight at the beginning and again at the end of the day. Either way the general acceptance held that there were two periods of 12 hours in a day.
As with most measurements, eventually an international standard is agreed and an hour is now defined as a 24th of a median Earth day.
Could there be an alternative explanation however? Could it be that the hour started to take shape as it is the amount of time that it takes to do things?
How many things do you do in a day that, there are there about, take an hour? Lunch takes about an hour, I get up about an hour before I go to work, you tend to get bored with television shows after about an hour. Even a football match takes about two hours.
Of course I’ll never be able to prove it as the definition of time is lost in history but my proposition is that time was formed around a set of periods based upon how long human things took. These gradually became agreed and it was accepted that, on average there were twelve of these in the daylight and twelve in the dark.
I guess it took me about an hour to make this up.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 