1 year ago

Chapter Thirty-Three: Sky High

The first mechanical public clocks introduced in Italy were mechanical 24-hour clocks which counted the 24 hours of the day from one-half hour after sundown to the evening of the following day. The 24th hour was the last hour of day time.[12]

From the 14th to the 17th century, two systems of time measurement competed in Europe:[13][14]

Italian (Bohemian, Old-Bohemian) hours (full-dial): 24 hours system with the day starting after sunset; on the static dial, the 24th hour was situated on the right side. In Italy, it was prevalently modified to a 4×6 hours system, but some 24hour dials lasted until the 19th century. The system has spread especially to the Alpine countries, Czech countries and Poland. In Bohemia, this system was finally banned only 1621 after the defeat on White Mountain. The Prague Astronomical Clock struck according to the Old Bohemian Clock until its destruction in 1945. The variant with counting from dawn is also rarely documented and used, e.g. on a 16th-century cabinet clock in the Vienna Art-History Museum.[15]
German (Gallic) hours (half-dial): 2×12 hour system starting at midnight and restarted at noon. It is typical with the 12-hour dial with 12 at the top.

The modern 24-hour system is a late-19th century adaptation of the German midnight-starting system, and then prevailed in the world with the exception of some Anglophone countries.

Striking clocks had to produce 300 strokes each day, which required a lot of rope, and wore out the mechanism quickly, so some localities switched to ringing sequences of 1 to 12 twice (156 strokes), or even 1 to 6 repeated four times (84 strokes).[12]

After missing a train while travelling in Ireland in 1876 because a printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., Sir Sandford Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the centre of the Earth, not linked to any surface meridian — a predecessor to Coordinated Universal Time.[16][17] He was an early proponent of using the 24-hour clock as part of a programme to reform timekeeping, which also included establishing time zones and a standard prime meridian.[18] The Canadian Pacific Railway was among the first organizations to adopt the 24-hour clock, at midsummer 1886.[16][19]

At the International Meridian Conference in 1884, American lawyer and astronomer Lewis M. Rutherfurd proposed:

That this universal day is to be a mean solar day; is to begin for all the world at the moment of midnight of the initial meridian coinciding with the beginning of the civil day and date of that meridian, and is to be counted from zero up to twenty-four hours.[20]

This resolution was adopted by the conference.[20]

A report by a government committee in the United Kingdom noted Italy as the first country among those mentioned to adopt 24-hour time nationally, in 1893.[21] Other European countries followed: France adopted it in 1912 (the French army in 1909), followed by Denmark (1916), and Greece (1917). By 1920, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Switzerland had switched, followed by Turkey (1925), and Germany (1927). By the early 1920s, many countries in Latin America had also adopted the 24-hour clock.[22] Some of the railways in India had switched before the outbreak of the war.[21]

During World War I, the British Royal Navy adopted the 24-hour clock in 1915, and the Allied armed forces followed soon after,[21] with the British Army switching officially in 1918.[23] The Canadian armed forces first started to use the 24-hour clock in late 1917.[24] In 1920, the United States Navy was the first United States organization to adopt the system; the United States Army, however, did not officially adopt the 24-hour clock until July 1, 1942.[25][26]

The use of the 24-hour clock in the United Kingdom has grown steadily since the beginning of the 20th century, although attempts to make the system official failed more than once.[27] In 1934, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) switched to the 24-hour clock for broadcast announcements and programme listings. The experiment was halted after five months following a lack of enthusiasm from the public, and the BBC continued using the 12-hour clock.[27] In the same year, Pan American World Airways Corporation and Western Airlines in the United States both adopted the 24-hour clock.[28] In modern times, the BBC uses a mixture of both the 12-hour and the 24-hour clock.[27] British Rail, London Transport, and the London Underground switched to the 24-hour clock for timetables in 1964.[27] A mixture of the 12- and 24-hour clocks similarly prevails in other English-speaking Commonwealth countries: French speakers have adopted the 24-hour clock in Canada much more broadly than English speakers, and Australia also uses both systems.

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OP: “Ningen nante” by Yoshida Takuro
ED: “Sky High” by Jigsaw