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In-Depth Why Clocks Run Clockwise (And Some Watches And Clocks That Don't)

Most timepieces have hands that turn clockwise, and the reason is much older than clocks themselves.

The first thing most of us notice about clocks and watches when we learn to tell time, is that the hands turn clockwise – the habit of perceiving clockwise motion as a representation of the forward movement of time is deeply ingrained; so much so that once having learned it, most of us cease to notice it at all. Imagine you are standing on the center of a watch: in any direction you face, the hands will appear to pass from left to right. Theoretically, we could just as easily tell time if they went from right to left, so why do clock and watch hands overwhelmingly have rightward, or clockwise, motion? Why is there no period in history where anticlockwise and clockwise rotation competed for supremacy? 

Daniels-Breguet No. 3225

Breguet No. 3225, completed by George Daniels about 1968; accepted by Breguet's then-owner George Brown as a Breguet clock. The hour ring rotates counterclockwise; a pointer on the right shows mean solar time, while a moveable Sun pointer on the left shows the Equation of Time. Image, Sotheby's.

The explanation for the overwhelming preference for clockwise movement of clock hands is somewhat obscure, but a likely explanation (and one often cited) is that if you happen to be in the northern hemisphere, and you stand facing the Sun's path across the sky, you'll see it describe a clockwise arc as it travels from the east, to the southern sky overhead, and finally to the west, where it sets. If you make a sundial, the shadow the sundial throws will likewise follow a clockwise course, going from west to north to east (in opposition to the path of the Sun).  Early clocks, so the thinking goes, simply reflected the apparent motion of the Sun, and of the gnomon (pointer) of a sundial. 

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Whether this is actually true is hard to establish with absolute certainty, but there is no reason mechanically for a clockwise direction of the hands to be preferred (it is as easy to make a clock with anticlockwise motion of the hands, as clockwise) and so, the idea that the movement of clock hands was generally made to ape the motion of a sundial's shadow seems a reasonable one. There may very well be documentation to that effect somewhere in the historical record; I haven't found anything specific but it's possible that somewhere out there is a manuscript in which a clockmaker from the 1300s writes, " ... and as the sundyal goeth, so shall goe ye olde hands of ye clocke, forsooth," or words to that effect. 

Sun's apparent motion in the Northern Hemisphere

Apparent motion of the Sun as seen in the Northern Hemisphere. Graphic, Weber State University, Utah.

This raises a couple of interesting further questions, which are: what did people call clockwise motion before there were clocks? The second of these is, what's so special about the northern hemisphere?

The answer to the first question is difficult; the idea that one would need to specify motion one way or the other around a circle doesn't seem to have been very widespread prior to the development of clocks, and people simply seemed to have said left or right, in most cases. Two old terms in English exist: widdershins (counterclockwise) and deosil or deasil (clockwise) though again, these seem to originally have more had the sense of left and right rather than clockwise or counterclockwise per se. "Widdershins" is first attested in 1545 (notably, well after the appearance of public clocks in Europe) and very colorfully. In the Scottish Records of Elgin, which cover the years 1280 to 1800, we read a complaint that says, "Sayand the said Margarat Baffour vas ane huyr and ane wyche and that sche ȝeid widersonnis about mennis hous sark alane," which roughly translates as "Claimed that the aforementioned Margaret Balfour, was a whore and a witch, and that she went [in the opposite direction to sunwise] about men's houses in only her shift."  Clearly if you wanted to be done for witchcraft in Elginshire in 1545, dancing counterclockwise in your nighty around someone's house was more than enough provocation.

national congress building, La Paz, Bolivia

The national congress building in La Paz, with anti-clockwise clock; image, Wikipedia.

There are a number of rather charming superstitions about clockwise and anticlockwise motion; one in Britain was that walking widdershins around a church three times was sufficient to summon the Devil (I haven't had the nerve to give it a shot) and in general moving anticlockwise seems to have been considered unlucky (as an extension to the idea that anything to do with leftward motion is also unlucky; after all, the Latin for left is "sinister" and not for nothing does "right" mean both the direction, and that which is proper or correct). 

As to why the relative motion of the Sun in the northern hemisphere should have come to dominate clock and watch design globally, the answer is probably that mechanical clocks were first widely developed in the northern hemisphere – a simple case of history being written by the victors (or inventors, in this case. Geography is also at work; nearly 70% of the Earth's land surface area is in the northern hemisphere as well). The subject would not have come up for many early clockmakers as many early clocks did not have hands at all, but rather, struck the hours on a bell or gong. However, that clockwise motion of clock and watch hands derives from astronomical observations in the northern hemisphere, and from the development of clockmaking in northern European nations, can seem culturally chauvinistic, and there have been attempts to make anticlockwise motion of the hands a standard – in 2014, Bolivia's national congress building in La Paz received a new clock whose hands move anticlockwise.

"I find the whole idea of time travel very unsettling if you take it to its logical conclusion. I think it might eventually be possible, but then what happens?"

– William shatner
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In an interview with The Guardian, Bolivia's foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, said, "We're in the south and, as we're trying to recover our identity, the Bolivian government is also recovering its sarawi, which means 'way' in Aymara," he said. "In keeping with our sarawi – or Nan, in Quechua – our clocks should turn to the left."

There are other public clocks with hands that move counterclockwise – one of the most famous examples is the great clock of Paolo Uccello, inside the Duomo; and in Prague, the Jewish Town Hall tower has two clocks; one has Roman numerals, and runs clockwise; the other has Hebrew letters on the dial, and runs counterclockwise. Of the clock, Rabbi Harlan J. Wechsler has written, "Going counterclockwise is not entirely strange to Jews. Did you ever notice, for example, that when the Torah is marched around the synagogue, we march it counterclockwise to the ark which is, theoretically, at twelve o’clock? That custom comes from the procedures of the priests in the Temple who walked up the slanted front of the altar and then would proceed counterclockwise around its periphery performing their required functions." 

The Jewish Town Hall tower clock in Prague.

If you want a watch with counterclockwise hands, you must expect thin pickings; for obvious reasons this is not a stock-in-trade for serious watch brands (or even semi-serious ones). However, there are a few out there – I've dug up a Swiss-made watch with the unlikely name of Bolshevik, which has counterclockwise hands (in homage to the Left, no doubt) and if you hunt around on Ebay, it is not difficult to find Seiko Lorus quartz "Goofy" watches, with counterclockwise hands (which is, you know, a goofy way for them to run, in case you missed the joke). In fact Ebay is a bit of a mother lode for "backwards watches." The idea that clockwise motion represents the forward motion of time so powerful that it's hard to look at such a watch or clock without having the slightly unsettling feeling that time is running backwards. 

Forwards time travel is not difficult; the theory of relativity tells us (and it has been experimentally verified; in fact GPS depends on it) that if you are traveling faster than some outside reference frame, your clock runs more slowly and so, in essence, you are traveling into the future. Backwards time travel, by the way, actually seems to be permissible in relativity theory; there are certain solutions to its equations that are "closed timelike curves," the traversing of which would be equivalent to backwards time travel. However, most physicists regard such solutions as theoretical rather than practical. A universe in which it can't happen is a much tidier one; backwards time travel has the potential to produce nasty paradoxes. The most famous is that you go back in time and shoot your own grandfather; for that reason it's thought to be in principle impossible. However, it can make for some thought-provoking – if disturbing – science fiction.

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Why is right tight and left loose? There is friction in the atmosphere. Da Vinci was left handed (and right handed) and he also invented clocks.

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wrt to your claim "the idea that one would need to specify motion one way or the other around a circle doesn't seem to have been very widespread prior to the development of clocks, " Well, sheep are rounded up by instructing the sheep-dog to run either clockwise or anti-clockwise. In England the shepherd's commands are : "Come-By" for clockwise and "Away" for anti-clockwise. I would imagine that those commands pre-date the invention of clocks.

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Clockwise motion is rightwise from the twelve at the top. A reason for preference for rightward motion might have been that the right hand has always been the preferred hand, because most people are right-handed. The left hand was considered the inferior, even deceptive, hand long ago, and this is the reason we shake hands with the right hand. Until fairly recently left-handed children were forcibly taught to write with their right hands in schools. The idea that the hands of a clock should more downward from the twelve sign to the left would have been unappealing to most people in former times. As a left-handed artist, I enjoy the fact that two of the greatest artists in history, among others, were left-handed: Leonardo da Vinci and Hans Holbein the Younger.

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You are correct that most people are right handed, but the reason the left hand was and still is considered “ inferior “ in some countries is because, well, they didn’t and still don’t use paper after doing their business. That’s what the left hand is for and why you don’t shake with it.

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"If you want a watch with counterclockwise hands, you must expect thin pickings; for obvious reasons this is not a stock-in-trade for serious watch brands (or even semi-serious ones)." I have a collection of backwards watches (mostly from eBay) ... including a Bulova and a Fossil. I'm pretty sure these two were not intended to run backwards, and in fact the Fossil sometimes runs forwards, sometimes backwards. (And I have another watch that does the same thing, maker unknown.) Does anyone have any idea how a watch can have a defect that causes it to run backwards (the Bulova) or run sometimes-forwards-sometimes backward???

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Great article. I'll add that in board sports, the left foot dominant stance is called "goofy"

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Very, very fun article. Reminded me of time in Asia learning different ways of ambulating around temples, shrines, relics and such -- there is magic in directions but the magical directions vary with cultures. Maybe I haven't read correctly, but please tell me this article is not implying that the sun in the Southern hemisphere crosses the sky counter clockwise. For why would the author, under the globe picture, put "Apparent motion of the Sun as seen in the Northern Hemisphere." or earlier, "is that if you happen to be in the northern hemisphere, and you stand facing the Sun's path across the sky,"? Any thoughts? [mind you, the winter sun is low in the Northern sky in the Southern Hemisphere, but still goes "clockwise" through the sky.]

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Yes, the article *is* stating that the sun goes counterclockwise in the Southern hemisphere. I have trouble picturing this, but here's one way to think of it. In the Southern hemisphere, the sun still rises in the East and sets in the West (because the Earth is rotating from West to East). In the northern hemisphere the sun is due South at noon, but in the Southern hemisphere the sun is due North at noon. So in the Northern hemisphere, the sun moves from East to South to West: clockwise. But in the Southern hemisphere, the sun moves from East to North to West: counterclockwise.

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Great article, thank you. I just wanted to bring in to the discussion one of my favourite calibres, the Seiko 6M25/6M26, the "dancing hand" Seiko. It is running clockwise in time and chronograph modes, but also has (among others) a timer mode for countDOWN timing, and when counting down, the hands do actually move counterclockwise, which I find fascinating! Once again, thank you for the article, again I learnt a lot.

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Or because western scripts read from left to right....

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"1...2...3...4...5...6...7...8...9...10...11...12..." Now wrap that around a circle

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Terrific piece of writing Jack. Hoping your politics are proper and correct also :)

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Great writing, as usual. And Jack demonstrates his true New York attitude by using the phrase “not for nothing...”.

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Take a look at water drainage Objects not attached to the surface of the earth (water in a sink going down a drain) will create a vortex going the opposite direction. So in the Northern hemisphere, it moves clockwise. In the Southern hemisphere, it moves counter clockwise. On the equator, water goes straight down.

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In all American Embassies in the Southern Hemisphere, we have special technology to make the water drain in the correct, clockwise American fashion.

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Hello alltogether, this was my first idea too. Not the coriolis force itself, but its outcome noticeable to everybody, providing a "natural" rotation in the northern hemisphere. It´s the same with screws. Why do we fasten them clockwise? I would disagree with the "sundial"-version, because if you have it on a wall, the shadow is "travelling" counter clockwise. However, the most simple explanation is most likely the right one. Thanks to Jack Forster for the entertaining article.

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Coriolis effect is so small it's negligible in all but the most controlled cases or when discussing large scale dynamics (oceans, wind etc). I think the sundial is the more likely explanation as it is horology related and while wall mounted examples rotate anti clockwise flat mounted examples are far more common. Alternately it may just be that it goes clockwise because a few critical watchmakers chose that direction and it became a convention after that. Chance is as likelier explanation as any other imho.

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Another theory is we are bound to turn clockwise as most people are right hand and it’s more ergonomically easier to turn clockwise? Hmm. 🤔 It also why people read from left to right and not right to left. Unless ur Chinese and you read top to bottom but even Chinese the column are right to left...

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What a cool concept for an article. And impeccable execution! It has been a good day. Makes one wonder though: time has been expressed through the clockwise/circle metaphor for so long that we can’t separate our perception from the symbol we use. I cannot imagine time being expressed by anything else to the point where I generally substitute time for the image of the circular watch, which is really just a metaphorical indication of time passed and disconnects one to a certain extent from “experiencing” time “accurately.” Interesting to think that so many of the representations in our everyday life we consider objective or directly connected to that which they represent are in fact (semi, as this article points out) arbitrarily chosen. Be cool if more watches showed time through other symbols. There are examples, like the counterclockwise ones mentioned above. I believe there’s a Russian watchmaker who shows time’s progressions in unusual ways. Then there’s always digital, but that’s no fun. Time itself can be said to be a measurement of distance, or at least seconds are a metaphorical indication of distance.... ...either way, I think this article broke me, for which I am thankful.

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Very interesting article with many things I have not heard of before. Thanks for the insight

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I had never considered why clocks run the direction they do before reading this article (I'll add that to my many many reasons for frequenting Hodinkee so many times each day). I wonder though, if there's a different explanation for the direction of movement on a clock's face. A clock is a measuring device, just like a ruler, scale or yard stick. In European cultures, and others where we read and write from left to right, our measuring devices work in the same direction. Zero starts at the left end of the scale and the numbers grow as they progress to the right. In the case of a clock, isn't the measure of time simply a ruler that has been bent into a circle, so that it can re-set itself at the end of a cycle? That would also explain why the Hebrew clock mentioned in the article runs in the opposite direction, as Hebrew - like Arabic - is read from right to left.

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Hi Jack, great article. As you touched on, describing rotational movement is important if you are circumabulating a shrine or temple as part of a ritual. That's why there are some old terms for clockwise and counterclockwise in sanskrit. Dakshina is clockwise, vama is counterclockwise. Generally, in India, you go clockwise, and this is, as you mention, attributed to having a solar inspiration. However, both in Hindu ritual and, to the north, in the Tibetan indigenous practice of Bonpo, counterclockwise circumambulation is associated with the moon, which, indeed, both orbits the earth in a counterclockwise direction and rotates on its axis counterclockwise as well.

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I'm digital

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Great article Thanks Jack

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The "jumping hours" in the Cartier Tank a Vis move in a clockwise path. Yet observing the larger numbers to the left of the smaller numbers as they move left to right is very disconcerting; and takes some getting used to. Think about that!

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It is always a joy to read Mr. Forster. He reminds me of a Spanish/German writer called Mauricio Wiesenthal, truly an exceptional individual who shares Mr. Forster´s wit and love of beauty, as well as what seems an incredible ability to explain the most difficult concepts in the simplest (and thus elegant) of ways.

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Great article, Jack! Kudos for referencing Primer — easily one of the best budget sci-fi films to date, and probably my favourite time travel film of all time.

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Did you notice that the Hebrew language town hall clock in Prague has the wrong time? The hands match the standard clock above, which should only happen at noon and midnight. It's 3:40 on the standard clock, but the Hebrew one reads 8:20.

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Why do you assume the Hebrew clock is wrong? Maybe the standard clock is wrong! Internet outrage!

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Mr. Forster is mistaken if he's suggesting that moving in a counter clockwise direction is viewed as unusual or unlucky. In fact, in the U.S., runners, horses and race cars all run exclusively in a counter-clockwise direction when racing around a track. In Europe and elsewhere, some horse races and auto races go in a clockwise direction, but certainly all human track racers--in the Olympics or other international competitions--run counterclockwise, as in the U.S. Many YMCA's and other facilities with running tracks, will set the running direction for counterclockwise on, say, four days a week and clockwise for, say, 3 days, simply because one can get uneven wear and development by turning exclusively in one direction!

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This may be so that the spectators, sitting outside the loop/track, see the more comfortable left to right procession.

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One good thing about a figure-8 loop is that is that the competitors have to continually shift from counterclockwise to clockwise and back again, evening the stress on both sides of the body or vehicle. Of course, a figure-8 loop has to be three-dimensional (dual-level) or the racers would keep crashing into each other. lol.

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Now give me a figure-eight watch complication – there’s something I’d like to see!

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I don't think he's mistaken at all. He uses the past tense to talk about the superstition, gives an example of said superstition, and never claims it is or was a universally held belief.

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The writer states that clockwise travel is the norm. The only example of counterclockwise travelers that he could come up with were Jewish worshippers carrying a Torah around the floor of a synagogue. Whether that's a mistake or not, it's odd that he was unaware that counterclockwise rotation is actually the STANDARD in the U.S. for tracks of every type and in international sports competition. Cars in the U.S. and most countries of the world have the controls on the left side of the vehicle, giving the driver better positioning and control for left-hand, counterclockwise turning.

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Most people have stronger right arm and leg, that's why it's easier to turn left rather than right.

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Yes, and also - from the perspective of the northern hemisphere at least - our precious home planet "goeth widdershins" (forsooth!) - both in its daily rotation (hence the apparent clockwise movement of sun and stars) and in its annual progress around the sun. All our neighbor planets and asteroids orbit the sun in the same fashion.

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Jack is the best writer at Hodinkee - bar none. Always well-researched and professional, never defensive, and with wit no less!

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