At least our hours are the same length regardless of latitude now, so let’s be grateful for that.
oh god, thanks for making me imagine something terrible
Clocks should use 24h format. AM/PM is completely useless.
No it’s not, with a 12h format on an analog watch you can use the sun to find true north. It is also easier to read it when the hands have double the amount of degrees to indicate the number.
Edit – digital watches should use 24h, I fully agree, maybe there was a misunderstanding because it’s analog watches we’re talking about here and these could stay 12h IMHO
How do you find north on a 12h face that wouldn’t work with a 24h face? Because the method I know, requires correcting for the 12h circle.
Yeah, that’s the method I know.
Divide the angle that is made in half
And that’s how you correct for the 12h face.
Thought as much but never had any experience with 24h watches, so no comment on this from my side :)
With a 24h watch, you line up the hour hand with the sun. Because the sun does a full circle in 24h and the hour hand does the same, lining them up will always make 24 point north (on the northern hemisphere).
A compass is still the better option, because the magnetic field also points north in the southern hemisphere and doesn’t have to be recalibrated when you move too far east or west.
deleted by creator
No, no comment in the sense of I have no experience with 24h watches so I cannot comment on them regarding this topic. If others have experience they might add their share, which they did.
I have never seem a 24h wrist watch (I know they exist) aside from extremely seldom as wall clocks
I’ve looked for them, but they’re very hard to find and expensive too. You can’t just slap a 24h face on a 12h mechanism, so it’s all custom and produced in low volumes. (I think it’s technically possible to convert a 12h period into 24h by switching out a single gear, but that might ruin your minute hand too? I’m no clock maker.)
They don’t have to be expensive, though such watches are less popular for everyday use. In fact I’m wearing a Vostok Kommendurski with a 12/24 hour dial. When I was a medic, I needed to record all my times in 24hr format on my run reports. I think I paid $35US delivered from Russia 15 or so years ago.
And no extra gear is needed to make an analog watch/clock indicate 24 hour time. Time doesn’t change. You simple have one scale that reads from 12AM through 12PM and then at the next hour, (1PM) it simply gets renumbered to 13, 14, 15, 16 and so on until you reach 24 on the inside scale. Easy peasey.
But it is possible to build a watch/clock that the movement does move in 24 hour time and you would be correct it would a couple of extra gears to accomplish. But, it would also be a real pain to create a legible watch face with all those numbers on a reasonable sized watch. Far simpler and easier to print the two scales on the face and call it good.
You paid $35 for the watch, the delivery or both? Because I saw those Vostok watches with proper 24h faces, which is exactly what I’m looking for, but they’re $140. I guess that’s not super expensive for a watch, but I can get a much nicer 12h watch for that money.
And a double numbered clock face is the simple solution, probably more convenient to read, but also not really a conversation starter :)
Vostok Komandirskie
I paid $35 delivered from Russia. And honestly, I do not remember if that was a sale price or not because it’s been enough years ago now.Despite all the cheap quartz watches found in Walmart, $140 really isn’t all that much for a properly made manual wind watch these days. Even a plastic Timex will set you back nearly $120 for a quartz LCD with 24 hour display and only one choice of looks. So I probably wouldn’t consider the price out of line for the Komandirski with multiple choices available.
A Bespoke 24 hour mechanical movement would be quite the piece of horology art. A conversation started indeed.
How the heck do you find north based on your watch? I’m pretty good at knowing where north in based on where I am.
I live in north Manchester so I know Manchester is south. Or I can look at the sun if not midday and figure it out.
How the heck do you find north based on your watch?
I live in north Manchester so I know Manchester is south
What if you go on a trip to Thailand and get turned around in the jungle?
Or I can look at the sun if not midday and figure it out
That gives you a very approximate direction.
Thanks.
I don’t generally go places like that, but if I needed to be aware of north I would take a compass.
Still good information though.
It’s the same method.
The distance between the sun and 12 is divided by two, because the clock face only shows half the day.
If we had a clock with 24 hours in the circle and used the same method, it’d be the same as pointing at the sun and saying: South is where the sun will be at noon.
It’s useless in the jungle, as you can’t see the sun.
You don’t need to stare directly into the ball of fire to determine where the Sun is. All you need is the flashes of light through the leaves - and you CAN see that in the jungle.
It sounds like a joke but I really had someone stop me on the street to ask for the time and when I said 2:30 they asked “AM or PM?” I guess a 24 hour clock would’ve prevented that.
The french:
Why the ‘IIII’ insted of ‘IV’?
Prevents confusion between the four and the six: III, IV, V, VI, when the watch is not held perfectly vertically for viewing.
Actually very common in watches with roman numbers iirc
i’m pretty sure that IV is a modern typographic thing
I’ve also heard that, because in Latin IV is the beginning of “IVPPITER” (Jupiter), there’s a theory that people avoided using “IV” as to not “disrespect” the god’s name. 🤷♀️
Also, on a 12 hour clock, 3 sets of four looks clean af I guess, e.g.:
- I, II, III, IIII
- V, VI, VII, VIII
- IX, X, XI, XII
Since the IIII usage is common in the Middle Ages and even into the Early Modern Period, when nobody believed in Jupiter, that is obviously just something somebody made up.
It could have also started from that and continued on despite people not knowing the reason, no? I do agree that it’s quite silly and unlikely, though.
May as well just go with VIIII then. Or maybe 9.
IIIIIIIII
Now I really want a .beats watch. That’s so retro cool.
If you’re ok with a screwdriver, you can mod a Casio F91-W and add a .beat watchface https://www.sensorwatch.net/docs/watchfaces/clock/#beat-time
Why does everything that comes from Switzerland always seem to be owned by Swatch? Do they not have any other brands there?
Swatch is the largest watch company in the world and you’ll be surprised which brands are owned by them. Omega for example
Goddamn metric time
Even the French figured out that decimalized time was stupid after a couple of years.
Which has added credence to the old saying that “The French follow no one. And no one follows the French.”
I kinda want to try it out lol
Why is it stupid beyond, “nobody else uses it”?
Well, beyond the sheer social resistance to the idea. Turns out everyone needs to agree it’s a great idea and almost no one did. Evidently humans are wired to the base12 time format far better.
The attempt at switching to base10 time quickly fell apart when people started notice that the the “time markers” were starting to drift. And at some point they finally figured out that what we call “noon” was going drift rather quickly to not happening until evening and therefore Monday was going to move to a different spot also. This is a very bad thing. Because any kind of calendaring system needs to be as consistent as possible. Noon must happen at the same point in the day every day or as close to it as it it can mathematically get. If it drifts to fast and far, then it’s a worthless marker for time. And decimal time has that problem in spades.
Now, no calendar system is perfect because the orbits of the planets in our solar system isn’t perfectly consistent. Sometimes the orbit of earth is a tiny bit faster or sometimes it’s a tiny bit slower. So we strive to get a close as we can but we still need to make adjustments. Turns out, all that math is really bloody hard.
??? That’s not how it worked at all.
They still had the same length of time per day; 24 hours was equal to 10 french hour, each french hour was 100 french minutes, and each french minute was 100 french seconds. So noon arrived at 5 every day.
The 6 means 30, both of which also mean 1/2
When I become dictator of the world, this will be the new time unit: https://metric-time.com/
The year will also have 13 months: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
The year will be 12025: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar
Because these things just make more sense. You will thank me after a few generations, because habits are hard to change.
If you make the 13th month a holiday with no work, you have my support .
Redefining the definition of a second sounds very problematic.
Team 13-month-calendar assemble!
I haven’t done enough digging on metric time, but if it’s implemented as a UTC/global time I can get behind that. I’m sick of timezones and DST.
Nah, instead we’ll go back to the local noon standard where the time zone is set by when the sun is directly above you. Instead of a couple dozen time zones we’ll have thousands.
Seems a bit odd to not use a base 10 number of months.
I’d love to have a 13-month calendar.
I’ll be there at H:00.
Don’t forget about π
τ > π
τ = 2π, but yeah that’s another letter that we can’t help but get involved
This is basically a standup routine
The clocks that use Roman numerals mix in letters.
Sounds like a Michael McIntyre bit
Somebody gave me this clock…I just need the time.
ten ten
I have no issue reading this.
piece of art
Sundials.
Now if you want to get really pissed, the magnetic North Pole is actually the South Pole of the Earth’s magnetic field. We call it the North Pole because the north side of a magnet points to it.
Don’t tell them about positive/negative electron movement.
Where am I?? 🫨🌀😵💫
Actually, we call it the North Pole because we already had a concept of North from the North Star. Then we invented magnets and decided that the part that points North is the North side of a magnet (despite North Pole being magnetic south).
A lot of people white knighting clocks in this thread
Somebody never had a clock with roman numerals and it shows
I remember getting into an argument with a grade school teacher over IIII because most such clocks put that for 4 instead of IV because of some fuckin reason
Weird, I’ve seen many analog clocks with Roman numerals but always IV for 4.
It’s actually called the “clockmakers four” or “watchmakers four.” it’s a thing.
Yeah I looked it up and saw it is a thing, and it’s interesting. I wonder if the clock I’m thinking of was just a really cheap one that was labeled as you’d expect based on Roman numerals or whether some just didn’t follow it.
To be fair, Google searching Roman numerals clocks give you about a 50/50 distribution.
I wasn’t aware of this either and I suspect we’re not alone. It’s not highly noticeable and if there’s a 50-50 chance won’t even see it…
False. I had a clock that used IIII instead.
Your clock having it doesn’t change that mine didn’t.
deleted by creator
I despise these so so much. IIII was historically NEVER correct. Some doofus decided to put that on a clock because it looks more symmetrical with the VIII on the other side. Terrible reasoning.
“However, even though it is now widely accepted that 4 must be written IV, the original and most ancient pattern for Roman numerals wasn’t the same as what we know today. Earliest models did, in fact, use VIIII for 9 (instead of IX) and IIII for 4 (instead of IV). However, these two numerals proved problematic, they were easily confused with III and VIII. Instead of the original additive notation, the Roman numeral system changed to the more familiar subtractive notation. However, this was well after the fall of the Roman Empire.”
https://monochrome-watches.com/why-do-clocks-and-watches-use-roman-numeral-iiii-instead-of-iv/
IIII was the way Romans usually wrote 4. It’s associated with simplicity / illiteracy. But also depended on era, region, intended audience, or practicality. I think the most famous example is the coliseum using LIIII.
There’s still variation even now; standardization is relatively new, and it’s not common knowledge. And dates… it’s like every 50-100 years people decided to write them differently.
