![]() ![]() ![]() “Your flight doesn’t leave for two hours.” “Why the hurry?” asked the check-in person. By the time they got through immigration it was past four o’clock and they hurried to the gate, getting there at twenty past. They had to change planes in the US and their boarding passes gave the departure time as 16:30. Mind you, I heard a story some years ago from a British woman who was travelling to the US with a friend. “Are you a doctor? Only hospitals use the 24 hour clock. ![]() “Why is your watch on the 24 hour clock?” he asked. One wanted to know the time and I showed him my watch. You’d come in in the morning and the computer clock would read 21:00 because he’d rebooted it the evening before and entered the time as 4:00.īack in the eighties I was on holiday in the US and talking to a group of Americans. I worked with one guy who never could get the hang of the 24 hour clock. Back then, you often had to re-enter the time every time you rebooted. This may have been because of my work with computers. I’ve been using the 24 hour clock since at least when digital watches became a thing back in the seventies. In sum, I deem the 24-hour clock a Britishism and, in these parts, On the Radar. In the United States, the only home of 24-hour time has until now been the military, as one knows from movies where people talk about “Fourteen hundred hours.” But it’s also (not surprisingly) widespread in the computer world, which is presumably where Amazon picked it up. Lynne Murphy said, “Very widespread–and I love it.” Mark Stradling ventured, “Written down, pretty much ubiquitous,” but noted a caveat: “Nobody talks like that, makes you sound like a robot.” The book was published in 2011 and things may have changed in the intervening years, at least according to the responses I got when I asked British people on Twitter if they thought the 24-hour clock was common in the UK. Boardman concludes, “Instead of having just one time system, we have two, and they’re both going to be with us indefinitely. The Lords endorsed the 24-hour clock in 1933 and the BBC experimented with it the following year, but no one seemed to like the idea and it was pretty much dropped till 1964, when the railways and London Transport adopted. He recounts how this idea was broached following World War I, was adopted by the British Army and Navy, and was endlessly debated in the House of Lords and the letters pages of The Times in the 1920s and early ’30s. I just read an entertaining free e-book on the subject called Counting Time: A Brief History of the 24-Hour Clock, by Peter Boardman. ![]() adoption of European time format?įor the purposes of this blog, the first question to answer is whether the 24-hour format is indeed a British thing. The key is that “21:00.” The traditional American rendition of that time is 9:00 PM. month/date/year).Ī communication I recently received from Amazon, giving instructions on returning an item to one of its Lockers, made me wonder if I might repeat that post’s success. The all-time most popular post on this blog, with more than 146,000 views and 99 comments, is “ European Date Format” (that is, rendering a date as date/month/year rather than the traditional U.S. ![]()
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