Archive for July, 2009
Why do clocks move ‘clockwise’?
Have you ever wondered why modern analog clock faces -- the kinds with "hands" -- are marked the way they are and move "clockwise" as they do? It all goes back to sundials.
When the earliest clocks were invented, i.e., sundials, they were set up to track the shadow cast by the sun as it appears to move from east to west across the Earth's sky. The first mechanical clocks made with faces and hands (early clocks often had pointers shaped literally to look like tiny hands) were made in the Northern Hemisphere, and used markings set up in a way that they followed this same path of the shadow on a sundial.
This became so standardized by early clock makers that this direction became known as "clockwise" -- with anything rotating in the opposite direction being called "counterclockwise."
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