Sign up here for our daily Thrillist email, and get your fix of the best in food/drink/fun. For instance, when removing or loosening a screw, you would rotate the screwdriver to the left. Beginning from the top, a circular rotation moves to the left, and from the bottom rotation moves to the right. So, if anyone every asks you why clocks run clockwise, feel free to say "just because they do." You'll be right, more or less. Short for counterclockwise, CCW is the rotation or movement of an object thats the opposite direction of the hands movement on a clock. It made sense instantly because people were familiar with the sundial. If you made the same sundial in South Africa, located in the Southern Hemisphere, the shadow would move counterclockwise.Īs clock technology progressed and moved away from sundials, the hands of a clock continued to move in a clockwise direction. If you jab a stick into the ground to make a sundial (with the stick serving as the sundial's gnomon) in a Northern Hemisphere country like Egypt, the shadow you'd tell time by moves in a clockwise direction. The video goes into detail, but the big nugget here is about sundials. And while the answer is kind of "just because," the channel contextualizes how we got to that point where the direction was just commonly accepted.Ī big part of the reason clock hands move in the direction they do is because of the direction the Earth rotates, as well as the fact that a significant portion of civilization happened to develop in the Northern Hemisphere. The Today I Found Out YouTube channel has endeavored to explain this basic bit of knowledge we take for granted. Go clean your room." That's not very helpful, but it's not entirely inaccurate. If you asked your dad as a kid he might have said, "They move that way because they do. It's engrained enough that it'd be easy to not realize there's a reason clocks run clockwise. When someone says to pass papers clockwise, you (hopefully) know exactly what they're talking about.
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