It’s easy to blindly accept that clocks move clockwise, sweeping left to right on the upper half of the face and right to left on the lower half. But have you ever wondered why this is the case? It isn’t dictated by some fundamental law of physics, nor our psychological perception of time, but rather by historical convention.
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The reason clocks move clockwise traces back to sundials, which were the ancient predecessors of mechanical clocks, and the tradition of mechanical time-keeping devices that developed in the Northern Hemisphere of Earth.
The Sun appears to move from east to west across the southern sky in the Northern Hemisphere. This causes the shadow on a sundial, which is fixed and points north, to shift from west to east over the course of the day, tracing the motion that we now call a clockwise direction.
There’s some debate about where and when the first sundial was developed. For instance, we could consider Stonehenge and other Neolithic monuments to be giant devices that use the Sun to tell time. However, most sources argue that the earliest true sundial dates back at least 3,500 years ago to Egypt.
The earliest mechanical time-keeping device was invented much later in China around 725 CE. Then, around 1270 to 1300 CE, gear-driven timepieces were also developed in Europe between northern Italy and southern Germany. Unlike today’s round-faced clocks with hands, these early devices used gears, cogs, and weights to mark the passing hours with striking bells or rotating dials.
Nevertheless, these inventions directly set the stage for modern clock design, which was inspired by age-old sundials. Notably, these developments occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, where sundials cast shadows that move in a clockwise direction, ultimately influencing the standard motion of clock hands.
If history had played out differently – if clocks were first developed in the Southern Hemisphere, where sundial shadows move in the opposite direction – perhaps counterclockwise would have been the norm instead.
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It’s a strange thought, but our perception of time is not universal and varies massively between cultures.
Some studies have suggested that people who use a written system arranged from left to right – like English and most European languages – tend to imagine time as proceeding from left to right when thinking abstractly. Meanwhile, people who read text arranged from right to left – like Arabic, Hebrew, and others – arrange time from right to left. Likewise, some researchers have argued that cultures that read scripts vertically, such as traditional Mandarin Chinese, tend to conceptualize time along the vertical axis.
If something as fundamental as our sense of time’s “direction” can be shaped by geography, history, and culture, it makes you wonder how many other things we take for granted might be just a fragile matter of our own perspective.
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