So, I was with my niece the other day. She’s got this old-school analog watch, bright pink. She’s just learning to tell time and, bam, she hits me with it: ‘Uncle, why do the hands only go this way?’ Pointing, you know, clockwise.
And I’m just standing there. Good question, right? It’s one of those things you just accept. It just is. But she’s looking at me, expecting wisdom. Kids.
So, I had to think. Really think. It’s not like they teach this in school. Or maybe I was asleep that day. I started wondering, what did people use before batteries and all that? The very first clocks.
Then it clicked. Sundials! Yeah, those things. A stick, a plate, shadows. I’d seen one in an old garden once, I think. Ancient tech.
Here’s the deal. Up here, in the Northern Hemisphere – where all the early clock guys were doing their thing – the sun makes shadows move from left to right. Sun up in the east, over the south, down in the west. The shadow on a sundial? It creeps around the same way we now see clock hands move.
So when they started building mechanical clocks, with all the gears and springs, they didn’t reinvent the wheel. They just copied what they knew. Made the hands move like the sundial shadows. Practical, eh? Follow nature, or at least, their bit of it.
Funny how these things happen. A global standard, all because of how shadows moved for some folks, a long time ago, in one part of the world. If those clever chaps had been Aussies, our clocks might be all backwards. But nope, history picked a path, and that was that. Just one of those little things that stuck.
