[gecko]

My favorite alt time is definitely the ancient way of doing things: there are twelve hours during the day, and twelve hours during the night. Yes, this means that the length of an hour at night is different from the length of an hour during the day (at least most of the year). This system is still used in some oddball places (like certain aspects of Jewish religious law, and possibly Islamic law as well for all I know), but, having written such a clock once, I did kind of like that you could get a feel for where you were in the year purely based on how fast the second hand was ticking during which half of the day.

[tdeck]

Japan kept up with a system like this until the early Meiji period (1870s). As you can imagine, it led to some interesting mechanical clock designs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock