The way I see it time has no more of a standard measure than a meter or a yard yet we all share the exact same division of time (less than a day). How did this happen and was it organized?
All things considered 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day does not fit with the rest of the SI measurements.
Thanks!
Edit: I understand things like a day, month, year all make sense to not need standardized but when speaking of less than a day is what I'm curious about.
There are two factors here, ships and trains. In order to work out exactly where you are at sea, you need to be able to calculate longtitude and latitude. In order to calculate lontitude, you need to know exactly when it's noon (and what time it is back in Greenwich). Particularly after the invention on John Harrisons H4 (a clock that could actually keep time) this led to the spread of accurate clocks around the world. Introducing hours and minutes to cultures that only had a vague notion of breaking up time in a day.
Before this, many cultures wouldn't have needed to break time down more that dawn, noon, afternoon, dusk and night, or perhaps certain intervals specified by church bells ringing or other types of call to prayer.
When trains and particularly train timetables started spreading you not only needed to know when it was quarter past one, but it had to be the same quarter past one as in a city a hundred miles away. This helped codify universal time, ensuring that if you had some other local system, it wasn't much good as everyone else was also on different time.