Who Came Up with Clockwise and Why?

If you grew up in the world before digital timepieces, you learned about the time-telling "hands " on an analog clock on the wall. The hands (big, little, even second hands) moved "clockwise.” Did you ever wonder why the hands moved in a particular direction?

Go back before clocks, gears, and pendulums, to ancient civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia that tracked time using sundials. All these cultures were in the Northern Hemisphere. That means the sun rose in the east, arched across the southern sky, and set in the west, and that means the shadow cast by a sundial naturally traveled in a loop: west to north to east.

If those ancient civilizations and their sundials had been in the Southern Hemisphere below the equator, the shadow would sweep in the exact opposite direction.

Clocks were invented in Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries, so to make these new machines intuitive, clocks were engineered with mechanical hands that mimicked the familiar, left-to-right sweep of the local sundial shadows.

European clockmaking dominated and became the global standard when clocks were exported to the Southern Hemisphere.

One rare exception to this includes the Old Town Hall in Prague, which runs "backward," mirroring the right-to-left direction of Hebrew script and local vertical sundials. I've seen this beautiful clock in person, and it always gathers a crowd of tourists who marvel at its movements of figures, but most people never notice the conterclockwise of it.