I learned about clocks
“Ah, yes. It would seem strange to you…”
He looked at my watch and nodded while drinking his wine.
“To put it simply, this world really does have twenty-eight hours. The same kind of hours we have on earth.”
“Do you mean…that each hour is sixty minutes, and a minute is sixty seconds?”
“Yes, that’s right. In fact, that watch…well…this perception of time. It is attributed to me…”
This started when he came to this world. He had been carrying his own watch, and realized the difference in how time passed here.
An analogue watch only had twelve numbers, and so you would realize the differences quite quickly.
“And since it was an analogue watch, there was no feature to automatically adjust the time.”
So he observed his watch carefully every day, and came to the conclusion that days were about four hours longer.
Apparently, it could go back or forward by a few minutes, but it was around four hours every day…
“And so the days are twenty-four hours. Half a day is fourteen hours. And one year is three hundred and thirteen days. Quite strange, isn’t it? The amount of time in a year is the same, but the time in a day is different.”
“Three hundred and thirteen… So that is around two months less than earth.”
“Of course, it’s not the standard in every country… But in this country, one month is between thirty-one and thirty-two days, while a year is ten months. Ah, and a week is seven days.”
“Is that because you based it off of the week having seven days?”
“Yes. I thought it would be easier that way.”
I already knew that a week was seven days, based on my life here.
“I see… But why do clocks and watches only have one hand?”
“Why? It’s simply due to cost.”
“The cost…”
Apparently, it was possible for them to make clocks with hands for seconds and minutes as well, but it would cost too much.
If it cost a lot to make, the selling price would also be high… And since his goal was to spread these devices as much as possible, they had to be cheap enough for most people to buy.
I wondered then why he couldn’t also spread the idea of minutes and seconds. But it had been a very long time ago, and he said that people mostly forgot.
I suppose it was not something most people would think about.
Speaking of watches, they were magic tools that used magic energy to work. However, thanks to the production method and lower prices, they were able to sell them in all kinds of stores, not just stores for magic tools. This helped with spreading them far and wide.
“I’m sure you can understand that even if it just tells the hours, having these would be incredibly useful…”
“Yes. It would make a big difference regardless.”
“So that is the reason that watches are quite different in this world.”
Like that, we continued to talk for some time about the differences, and shared our knowledge.
By the time that we were finished talking, he had completely finished his plate, much to my shock. How did he stay so thin… It was a bigger mystery than anything in this world.
Aside from watches, he told me that one of the first changes he brought about was proper sewage systems. As there were sanitary concerns.
After all, rats tended to spread in unclean cities, which would lead to plagues.
Something similar had happened in our world, called the black death. And many lives had been lost.
And so he used magic tools to purify the sewage water before returning it to the river. People had been shocked because it was now clean enough to drink.
Though, I still would not want to drink any river water if it was close to those sewage pipes…
Thanks.