Hour


An hour is a unit of time historically reckoned as of a day and defined contemporarily as exactly 3,600 seconds. There are 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day.
The hour was initially established in the ancient Near East as a variable measure of of the night or daytime. Such seasonal hours, also known as temporal hours or unequal hours, varied by season and latitude.
Equal hours or equinoctial hours were taken as of the day as measured from noon to noon; the minor seasonal variations of this unit were eventually smoothed by making it of the mean solar day. Since this unit was not constant due to long-term variations in the Earth's rotation, the hour was finally separated from the Earth's rotation and defined in terms of the atomic or physical second.
It is a non-SI unit that is accepted for use with SI. In the modern metric system, one hour is defined as 3,600 atomic seconds. However, on rare occasions an hour may incorporate a positive or negative leap second, effectively making it appear to last 3,599 or 3,601 seconds, in order to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of UT1, the latter of which is based on measurements of the mean solar day.

Etymology

Hour is a development of the Anglo-Norman houre and Middle English ure, first attested in the 13th century. It was a borrowing of Old French ure, a variant of ore, which derived from Latin hōra and Greek originating in Proto-Indo-European root , making hour distantly cognate with year; the Greek word hṓrā was originally a vaguer word for any span of time, including seasons and years. The Anglo-Norman word hour displaced older native words like tide and stound (

History

Antiquity

Ancient Mesopotamia

Ancient Egypt

In ancient Egypt the flooding of the Nile was, and still is, an important annual event, crucial for agriculture. It was accompanied by the rise of Sirius before the sunrise, and the appearance of 12 constellations across the night sky, to which the Egyptians assigned some significance. Influenced by this, the Egyptians divided the night into 12 equal intervals. These were seasonal hours, shorter in the summer than in the winter. Subsequently, the day was divided into intervals as well, which eventually became more important than the nightly intervals. These subdivisions of a day spread to Greece, and later to Rome.

Ancient Greece

The ancient Greeks kept time differently than is done today. Instead of dividing the time between one midnight and the next into 24 equal hours, they divided the time from sunrise to sunset into 12 "seasonal hours", and the time from sunset to the next sunrise again in 12 "seasonal hours". Initially, only the day was divided into 12 seasonal hours and the night into three or four night watches.
By the Hellenistic period the night was also divided into 12 hours. The day-and-night was probably first divided into 24 hours by Hipparchus of Nicaea. The Greek astronomer Andronicus of Cyrrhus oversaw the construction of a horologion called the Tower of the Winds in Athens during the first century BCE. This structure tracked a 24-hour day using both sundials and mechanical hour indicators.
The canonical hours were inherited into early Christianity from Second Temple Judaism.
By AD 60, the Didache recommends disciples to pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day; this practice found its way into the canonical hours as well. By the second and third centuries, such Church Fathers as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Tertullian wrote of the practice of Morning and Evening Prayer, and of the prayers at the third, sixth and ninth hours.
In the early church, during the night before every feast, a vigil was kept. The word "Vigils", at first applied to the Night Office, comes from a Latin source, namely the Vigiliae or nocturnal watches or guards of the soldiers. The night from six o'clock in the evening to six o'clock in the morning was divided into four watches or vigils of three hours each, the first, the second, the third, and the fourth vigil.
The Horae were originally personifications of seasonal aspects of nature, not of the time of day.
The list of 12 Horae representing the 12 hours of the day is recorded only in Late Antiquity, by Nonnus. The first and twelfth of the Horae were added to the original set of ten:
  1. Auge
  2. Anatole
  3. Mousike
  4. Gymnastike
  5. Nymphe
  6. Mesembria
  7. Sponde
  8. Elete
  9. Akte
  10. Hesperis
  11. Dysis
  12. ''Arktos''

    Middle Ages

Medieval astronomers such as al-Biruni and Sacrobosco, divided the hour into 60 minutes, each of 60 seconds; this derives from Babylonian astronomy, where the corresponding terms denoted the time required for the Sun's apparent motion through the ecliptic to describe one minute or second of arc, respectively. In present terms, the Babylonian degree of time was thus four minutes long, the "minute" of time was thus four seconds long and the "second" 1/15 of a second.
In medieval Europe, the Roman hours continued to be marked on sundials but the more important units of time were the canonical hours of the Orthodox and Catholic Church. During daylight, these followed the pattern set by the three-hour bells of the Roman markets, which were succeeded by the bells of local churches. They rang prime at about 6am, terce at about 9am, sext at noon, nones at about 3pm, and vespers at either 6pm or sunset. Matins and lauds precede these irregularly in the morning hours; compline follows them irregularly before sleep; and the midnight office follows that. Vatican II ordered their reformation for the Catholic Church in 1963, though they continue to be observed in the Orthodox churches.
When mechanical clocks began to be used to show hours of daylight or nighttime, their period needed to be changed every morning and evening. The use of 24 hours for the entire day meant hours varied much less and the clocks needed to be adjusted only a few times a month.

Modernity

The minor irregularities of the apparent solar day were smoothed by measuring time using the mean solar day, using the Sun's movement along the celestial equator rather than along the ecliptic. The irregularities of this time system were so minor that most clocks reckoning such hours did not need adjustment. However, scientific measurements eventually became precise enough to note the effect of tidal deceleration of the Earth by the Moon, which gradually lengthens the Earth's days.
During the French Revolution, a general decimalisation of measures was enacted, including decimal time between 1794 and 1800. Under its provisions, the French hour was of the day and divided formally into 100 decimal minutes and informally into 10 tenths. Mandatory use for all public records began in 1794, but was suspended six months later by the same 1795 legislation that first established the metric system. In spite of this, a few localities continued to use decimal time for six years for civil status records, until 1800, after Napoleon's Coup of 18 Brumaire.
The metric system bases its measurements of time upon the second, defined since 1952 in terms of the Earth's rotation in AD1900. Its hours are a secondary unit computed as precisely 3,600 seconds. However, an hour of Coordinated Universal Time, used as the basis of most civil time, has lasted 3,601 seconds 27 times since 1972 in order to keep it within 0.9 seconds of universal time, which is based on measurements of the mean solar day at 0° longitude. The addition of these seconds accommodates the very gradual slowing of the rotation of the Earth.
In modern life, the ubiquity of clocks and other timekeeping devices means that segmentation of days according to their hours is commonplace. Most forms of employment, whether wage or salaried labour, involve compensation based upon measured or expected hours worked. The fight for an eight-hour day was a part of labour movements around the world. Informal rush hours and happy hours cover the times of day when commuting slows down due to congestion or alcoholic drinks being available at discounted prices. The hour record for the greatest distance travelled by a cyclist within the span of an hour is one of cycling's greatest honours.

Counting hours

Many different ways of counting the hours have been used. Because sunrise, sunset, and, to a lesser extent, noon, are the conspicuous points in the day, starting to count at these times was, for most people in most early societies, much easier than starting at midnight. However, with accurate clocks and modern astronomical equipment, this issue is much less relevant.
Astrolabes, sundials, and astronomical clocks sometimes show the hour length and count using some of these older definitions and counting methods.

Counting from dawn

In ancient and medieval cultures, the counting of hours generally started with sunrise. Before the widespread use of artificial light, societies were more concerned with the division between night and day, and daily routines often began when light was sufficient.
"Babylonian hours" divide the day and night into 24 equal hours, reckoned from the time of sunrise. They are so named from the false belief of ancient authors that the Babylonians divided the day into 24 parts, beginning at sunrise. In fact, they divided the day into 12 parts or into 60 equal parts.

Unequal hours

Sunrise marked the beginning of the first hour, the middle of the day was at the end of the sixth hour and sunset at the end of the twelfth hour. This meant that the duration of hours varied with the season. In the Northern hemisphere, particularly in the more northerly latitudes, summer daytime hours were longer than winter daytime hours, each being one twelfth of the time between sunrise and sunset. These variable-length hours were variously known as temporal, unequal, or seasonal hours and were in use until the appearance of the mechanical clock, which furthered the adoption of equal length hours.
This is also the system used in Jewish law and frequently called "Talmudic hour" in a variety of texts. The Talmudic hour is one twelfth of time elapsed from sunrise to sunset, day hours therefore being longer than night hours in the summer; in winter they reverse.
The Indic day began at sunrise. The term hora was used to indicate an hour. The time was measured based on the length of the shadow at day time. A hora translated to 2.5 pe. There are 60 pe per day, 60 minutes per pe and 60 kshana per minute. Pe was measured with a bowl with a hole placed in still water. Time taken for this graduated bowl was one pe. Kings usually had an officer in charge of this clock.