Yesterday I was thinking about how clocks could perhaps be improved upon by making them follow solely dozenal system… and lo and behold, a quick internet search led me to an implementation of just that!
It looks familiar at first, but you notice the difference very quickly. No 10, 11, or 12 on it for one (to be expected in dozenal), and there appears to be more hands than usual! Seems complicated, but it’s actually even simpler than the one we’re used to:
- The shortest hand follows the sun and circles the clock once a day (24h), pointing down at midnight and up at noon.
- Longer red hand is 12 times faster, meaning it circles the clock in the exact time it takes the shortest to move from 0 to 1 (2h).
- Every hand moves 12 times faster than the shorter one! So the next one circles the clock in 10 minutes and the fastest in 50 seconds.
- You could of course keep adding hands by again increasing the speed by 12, but those would move so fast we’d have little use for them. (next one would circle the clock in about 4s)
Unfortunately I have no clue what to call these time units, but I love them! The longest/fastest of these hands circles the clock 1728 times a day, which is 1000z in dozenal! This clock makes converting from one time unit to another a breeze, just move the dozenal point! (same advantage as SI-system generally has in decimal) No need to multiply with 60 or 24.
I’ll leave the beauty of digital presentation of time in this system for you to figure out. Check out the site linked above and just play around with it for a bit!