Clocks & Time Facts for Kids
Fascinating facts about time and how we measure it
Before railway timetables, every town set its own local time based on the sun — trains made this chaos unworkable and led to standardised time zones.
The world's most accurate atomic clocks would lose less than one second in 30 billion years — more than twice the age of the universe.
The first mechanical clocks appeared in Europe in the 13th century — before that, people used sundials, water clocks, and hourglasses.
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) became the global time standard in 1884 at an international conference in Washington, DC.
Ancient Egyptians were the first to divide the day into 24 hours — 12 for daytime and 12 for night-time.
The word "clock" comes from the Latin "clocca," meaning bell — early clocks told the time by ringing bells rather than displaying hands.
India uses a half-hour time zone offset — it is UTC+5:30, not a round number of hours ahead of Greenwich.
The International Date Line in the Pacific means that two islands just a few kilometres apart can officially be a full day apart.
There are 38 different time zones in the world, because some countries use 30- or 45-minute offsets rather than full hours.
Leap seconds are occasionally added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to keep our clocks in sync with Earth's actual, slightly irregular rotation.