How did they arrived to have 60 minutes for 1 hour, 24 hours for 1 day?

Question

Also is there any correct explantion that how come normal year and leap year? how did they fixed a leap year should be 366 days and normal year as only 365 days? why is specifically in the month of february. How do they arrived the days for month.

Answer 1

History has been oscillating between base ten and base twelve counting systems ever since histories have been recorded.

This has been because of the number of digits on both hands of normal people.

Most people think that you can only count to ten using both hands, one for each of the five fingers on each hand, but, if you count a closed fist as another number, you can count to six on each hand, or twelve using both hands.

So, in some parts of the world, they divided the day and the night into ten equal divisions, but in some parts of the world, they divided day and night into twelve equal divisions, and called them 'hours'.

Then, when people started getting used to the concept of hours, they figured they needed to come up with even smaller measurments of time, and called them "minutes" meaning "the most minute, or smallest measurable unit of time."

It used to be that there were ten minutes per ten-hour day and twelve minutes per twelve-hour day, but then, someone came up with the concept of dividing a twelve minute hour by five, which a person COULD count to by using the fists and fingers of each hand and the toes of one foot (which cannot be fisted, so it cannot be so easily converted into anything base-six or base-twelve) giving us a sixty-minute hour, and for some reason, instead of further dividing it into 120-minute hour, or anything smaller, the sixty-minute hour stuck.

Instead, as chronometry became more and more precise, instead of making the "minutes" smaller, each "minute" was further divided into sixty "secondary minutes", which is why we now say that each minute is divided into sixty "seconds".

My fellow contributors are correct in saying that some of our current time system comes from the Babylonians and some from the Sumarians, and others... as they all had a hand in shaping the way we tell time nowadays. But the Greeks and the Romans did, too.

The one thing I can say about anybody declaring any one society as being the source of our counting system, however, is that every time anybody has said that we got it from one society, some archaeologist comes along showing that they got it from even earlier societies.

Now, about February 29th.

It was sometime before the Ceasar Dynasty of the Roman Empire when the Roman Senate declared the year to be precisely 365 days in length.

It didn't take too many generations for the Romans to realize that their Winter Solstice and Summer Solstice celebrations were occuring earlier and earlier than the Winter and Summer solstices were actually occurring, so, in the waning days of the Roman Empire, the Senate decided to alter the laws pertaining to the length of a year, and delcare that every fourth year, instead of being 365 days long, would consist of 366 days.

This is because the astrologers during the days of the Roman Empire knew that the earth does NOT orbit around the sun in a nice, orderly precise-to-the-day kind of thing, but each orbit is about 365¼ days.

So, about every four years, if they didn't add another day to the year, then their New Years celebrations wind up becoming another day earlier.

But, it took them several centuries for the Roman Senate to figure that out.

The problem with the 4-year leap-year cycle is that the earth's orbit around the sun isn't precisely ¼ of a day, but slightly less, So after a few centuries of that system, it was found that their New Years celebrations were occuring another day later than the winter Solstice.

So, the decision to limit the Leap Years to every fourth year except the fourth year at the turn of the Century is one that can be traced back to the early days of the British Parliament, and is commemorated in the song "The twelve days of Christmas".

At some point in Parliamentary deliberations, there were only ten members of the House of Lords needed to keep the current 11-day discrepency between the winter Solstice and New Years, to become 12 days... (and then much later on, 13 days, and so forth). So one of the newspapers published a song about how silly it would be to allow one more day to work its way into the Christmas Holiday Season, and included the line "Ten Lords a Leaping", which, is the ONLY line that doesn't make any sense in any other sense. That is where the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" came to be.

Since that act of Parliament, however, it has been noticed by astronomers that there is also the need for what are called Leap Seconds.

All, in order to try to maintain a more accurate and precise measurement of years.

As for why leap days are added to the month of February...

The reason that there are twelve "months" in a year is because there are always twelve complete lunar cycles in each year, and almost a thirteenth, so there are always twelve new moons and sometimes there are thirteen, which is why some calendars, including the Hebrew calendar had thirteen months, although they alwasy had twelve lunar-cycle-sized months and their thirteenth month consisted of the number of days until their new year.

Sometime before the Caesar Dynasty, the Romans had decided to do away with the thirteenth month and only recognized twelve months.

The reason that February normally has 28 days is that that is how many days all of the months started out with, because that is about how many days there are between new moons.

When The Greeks or the Romans did away with the extra month, they started adding a day or two at a time to the other months of the year.

I should also point out that originally, the months were numbered, before the Romans started giving the months names.

August is named after the Emporer Agustus.

July is named after the Emporer Julius.

January is named after the god Janus. March is named after the God Mars.

Off the top of my head, I don't recall where February, April, May, and June got their names, but September, October, November, and December are still named after the latin words for seven, eight, nine, and ten, respectively.

So, January at one point was the eleventh month of the year, and February was the twelfth month of the year, which had been followed by the shorter, more erratic thirteenth month, which had been done away with.

When they did away with the thirteenth month, they had to do something with all those days that used to belong to it, so they divided them amongst the various months.. thirty to some months, thirty-one to other months. Initially, it was decided that the twelfth month of the year, the final month of the year, now called February, would NOT gain any additional days, so that there would be less confusion as to how many days remained until the New Year celebrations.

But, in the latter days of the Roman Empire, after Christianity became the offical religion of the Roman Empire, and the Church declared Solstice worship to be evil, the romans decided that it shouldn't really matter all that much if everybody were celebrating the new year amidst a bit of confusion as to which day it should fall upon, and they added the leap year to the final month of the Roman Calendar, which was February.

It was a few centuries after the fall of the Roman empire on a year that the Winter Solstice fell on December 25, that the Roman Catholic Church decided to allow its membership to celebrate a holiday while all the pagans were busy celebrating the solstice and the new year, which is why Christmas is celebrated on December 25.. between the Winter Solstice and the so-called New Year.

And with the incept of leap seconds, it might take a near-earth object altering the orbit of the earth around the sun for us to ever have to worry about needing to make any changes to our calendars ever again.

Answer 2

You can thank the Babylonians for the 60 minute hour. They counted in base 60 not ten like us. The 24 hours comes indirectly from the 60 also. There are 5 12's in sixty and they chose to use 12 hours for daylight and the same for darkness..

The leap year come from the fact that it takes the earth 365 and 1/4 days to complete and orbit around the sun. Every four years we have an extra day so we put in the extra day in the leap year.

Answer 3

how we ended up with the numbers of days in each month is a long and interesting historical story - there have even been numerous books written on the subject.

In brief, we used to only have 10 months - which is why the 12th month, December, has the prefix Dec, which is latin for 10, also Sept = 7, Oct = 8, Non = 9

In ancient times there were no leap years either, and the year had only 365 days. The ancient ancients were cleaver people and did actually realise that the year was 365.25 days long. They just lacked a uniform and regulated system of government that could fix, and more importantly, implement a solution to this problem.

The world had to wait for the highly organised and powerful Romans to get this issue sorted out. It had been going on for a long time and by the time Julius Ceasar came around (about 200 AD??) the seasons were so far out of balance with the months of the year the Northern hemisphere harvest was almost happening in what should have been winter! Julius decided to fix every thing up so he implemented the following change:
He added a ridiculous number of days to one October (like 150 or something!) to get the seasons back to the months they should be in, and he also implemented the leap year system to keep this in order going forward.

Sometime after Julius the Romans had another emporer in Augustus. Augustus was also highly revered by the senate and the people of Rome.

Evntually the senate decided to honour their two greatest emporers by naming months after them. So they jigged around the calandar and inserted two new months, July and August. Things would have worked out nicely if they had stuck to their plan of having months with alternating days of 30 and 31, except this would have put 366 days in the year, so they knocked one off February to even things up. Then they thought, according to their plan July would have had 30 days and August 31 days and they didn't want to insult Julius by having one less day in his month compared with August - the solution... chop another day off February and give it to July. Because February is already short a couple of days its a good place to stick a leap day every 4 years or there abouts.

The 60 second 24 hour thing goes back to the sumerians (I think), but I can't remember the detail - I'm sure google will be able to help.

Answer 4

> How did they arrived to have 60 minutes for 1 hour, 24 hours for 1 day?

Units of time are dependent upon the relationships of the earth, sun, moon, etc. in the sky and the relationships among the parts of the human body that mankind used to represent awareness of the relationships in the sky. The number 60 is extremely representative of celestial relationships. See Chinese and Babylonia, for example. The number 60 is also well and easily represented on the hands. The number 24 is also well represented in both the sky and on the hands.

Answer 5

Time is constant and only measured by what means man decides to use to measure it. Our time is based on the rotation of the earth and is related between minutes of time and degrees of longitude. 360 degrees in a circle or a complete trip around the earth. Time was once measured by "moons", the time it took to go from one phase to another. ( ie 2 moons journey) Sundials were probably the first type of time keepers and were crude to beging with. A stick in the ground and following its shadow tells the passage of time. it is just what ever way you use to measure it.

Starting with the day - 360 degrees in our rotation, breaking it down to 6 sixty degree sections. (how long would it take to turn 60 degrees?) Still too long a time frame to measure it was broken down further. 60 degrees divided by 4 gives 15. To keep it short and simple - it takes 4 hours to spin 60 degrees. 6x4 hours is 24 hours. Divide that by 4 and you get one hour to each 15 degree spin. So every hour the heavens seem to move 15 degrees. So if you had a protractor, you could sight the sun and with out a watch you could tell how long you have been outside by measuring the angles of the sun from the horizon. (a sextant)

Answer 6

Because feb has less days!!!!!!!!!!