The history of time as we know it now

There are civilizations on Earth that have no notion of time. Evidently, they have a notion that the "day" is the time that elapses between the birth and the sunset, and then comes the night. However, they do not know how to indicate the hours as we do. And this is not strange, because the concept is very recent.

Well, the concept of time is old - it came from the Sumerians, who used 24 as the basis of their counting system instead of 10. This is because, instead of counting on the fingers, they counted on the knuckles of the fingers (there are 12 in each hand, discounting the thumb). So, after the Sumerians decided that there were 24 hours in a day, it would be normal for another subdivision to emerge, right? That is, minutes and seconds.

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When the first mechanical watches were invented, most only marked the hours. Finally, in 1800, when the train trip became popular, people began to realize that a unit of time less than the hour was necessary in their daily life. Since trains traveled much faster than horses, people needed some way of measuring the arrival time of the vehicle in a more specific way than simply seeing where the Sun was.

In the 1860s, Great Britain Railway of Great Britain decided to standardize time arbitrarily based on the Greenwich clock. Thus, finally the concept of minutes and seconds began to be part of our day to day.

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