Probably because it was invented well after we mostly lived in caves. 🤷♂️
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Yes, because, you know, you can look outside most of the times.
Hey, where are my fellow ISO-8601 fans?
REPRESENT.
Even in Canada I grew up with non-American time, thanks to German parents, and knew of AM/PM only via analog clocks and use outside of the home. I remember confusing the heck out of an elementary school teacher by giving an afternoon/evening time in proper units. She had to do the math (calculators still being hella rare in those days) to convert out of PM in order to see if I was correct or not.
RFC 9557
Clocks were sundials.
If you can see the time, it's not night.
100% This.
Also, being an evolution of sundials is the reason all analog clocks move their hands in the same direction.
*Being evolution of sundials located on the northern hemisphere.
Sundials were almost certainly invented in the Northern Hemisphere and probably didn't break into the southern hemisphere until late antiquity at the earliest, so it kinda makes sense that it'd be centered around that concept. Also clocks were invented in the northern emisphere as well, wait are there southern hemisphere clocks that turn the opposite way like those maps where the southern hemisphere is on top?
Sundials were absolutely surely invented several times around the world, also in Australia etc. After all, a sundial is nothing but a stick in the ground.
If mechanical clocks were invented before colonizers arrived, then the colonizers' clocks eventually replaced them. But, I understand they were invited only after all of the southern hemisphere had been colonized by less civilized nations, so they follow the colonizers' standards everywhere.
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AM/PM time is another thing that needs to sink with the USA, just like the Imperial system and Fahrenheit.
EU fella here. I'm strongly pro-Metric and yet don't see a problem with 12-hour time. 24-hour is kind of clumsy to use in informal speech or chat/text, but I would use it in all other instances.
I use 24h all the time when speaking, never got strange gazes for doing so. And I never remember which one is midday and which is midnight on the 12-hour time.
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Although the 12 hours aren't divided in day/night are they?
And depending on where/when you're at, it can easily be light out at seven and seven, even in the same day.
What the 12 hour clock does well is to track when the sun goes up or down relative to the only convenient time marker: midday. It also does so in a pleasingly symmetrical way: it gets light and dark at about 8, rather than 4 hours before and 8 hours after midday.
I'd argue if you want to track time, rather than record the ends of daylight, a linear scale for the whole day makes more sense. If it should be reset daily or not, be divisible by 24, 86400, 100, 1000000, a second or whatever is mostly a choice of convention. If you have constant access to a clock, Internet time seems convenient, for humans without clocks we use daylight and units like hours and 5-minute increments.
For that the 24 hour clock seems simple and convenient, although it would be nice to be able to calibrate without a watch (is it two or three hours before midday? How many more hours until wake-up time?). 24 hour time isn't perfect, but it's much better adapted to modern life than the 12 hour clock.
I still don't know why everyone doesn't just use the 24-hour clock. It's so much easier.
It's like someone had doubts people could count much past 12, so just had them do that twice. Or maybe Big Clock didn't want to manufacture 24 hour faces and sold the lie.
As for the clock face, a 12 hour face is much easier to read at a glance or from a distance.
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I took a nap one time on a spring afternoon and woke up at 6:00. Only I wasn't sure if it was afternoon or I slept all night until morning. Weird feeling.
I did this recently. I woke up at "sunrise", had a cup of coffee, and it started getting darker outside. I was very confused for a few minutes.
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Wow, that's cool! I've never even heard of a clock face like this before today. Definitely haven't seen one, even as a mid-millenial.
I've never seen one of these in person. Only in pictures.
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