This is, usually, a history column. History is the recording of change, understanding it where we can, sometimes learning from it when we should. Sometimes it sends my mind off on strange tangents. Sometimes, of course, I just like to have a little fun
Today I'm expressing my concern with the fading power of the number 12. This is a deeper and more insidious socio-cultural problem than we realise.
Battery power is one change. Cars normally run on 12 volt batteries, battery-powered tools did, I forget what voltage the battery-powered phones of the 1940s and 1950s had (How many remember the big cylindrical batteries inside the wall cabinet that was the telephone?) and the wireless (alright, radio) ran on 12 volt wet-cell batteries.

Now I have power tools of 12V, 18V, 24V and even 32 volts. Happily my boat still runs on 12-volt batteries.
A cricket team might have a 12th man, but he usually does no more than carry the drinks. Is that fair? Why shouldn't the seventh man carry the drinks sometimes or the fourth man? This clearly another case of the number 12 being treated with disdain.
Do you remember the hilariously funny "Twelfth Man" in the "Wired World of Sports"? Great tapes, but gone. They, whoever 'they' were, made a film called The Third Man back in 1959. It should have been called "The Twelfth Man" and proof the name would have worked well is that the Norwegians made a film with that name in 2017 and the Indians in Kerala state made another in 2022.
Shakespeare wrote "Twelfth Night" in about 1602 as a celebration of the Twelfth Night of Christmas, a show to recognise the end of Christmas. It was also called "As You Will" but the power of 12 had by then made Twelfth Night the preferred name. For you people who add up and divide and other wise play with numbers for forecasting the future, 1602 is 136.5 twelves. Make of that what you will.
There is still that rather odd song "The Twelve Days of Christmas". It came from England in the late 1700s and has endured a few small changes, but on the 12 days of Christmas these gifts were given to someone who must have been ready to shoot the sender by that 12th night.
The gifts are, day by day, a partridge in a pear tree, two turtle doves, three French hens, four calling birds. five gold rings, six geese a-laying, seven swans a-swimming (that makes 17 birds to be housed and fed), then the costs really escalate, with eight maids a-milking (presumably with their own cows) and the people-trafficking continues with nine ladies dancing, 10 lords a-leaping, 11 pipers piping and, finally 12 drummers drumming. Hopefully they were drumming a tune that was matched by the pipers, but, even so, that is 50 extra mouths to feed. Merry Christmas!
Remember that by pulling down your Christmas tree before Twelfth Night you will be bringing bad luck down upon your head,
Did you ever wonder just why there are 60 minutes in an hour, or why there are 24 hours in a day? For that matter, who crammed 60 little seconds into each of those minutes?
Doctor Google explained to me that the ancient Babylonians had a sexagesimal counting system, which means that they used 60 as the base number where we use 10. They may have been smarter than us. Perhaps, though, they were not much smarter than the Sumerians who preceded them, along the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the so-called cradle of civilisation. The Sumerians also had a base-60 system, and they were, interestingly, the first civilisation to be able to write, not that that has anything to do with this story.
Just imagine that clocks might have been metricated when all the other great things like roods and perches and guineas and florins and guineas and acres and miles were done away with and replaced by metric terms. Imagine a 24-hour clock translated into metrics. Can you imagine saying "It's ninety eight to seventeen"? A hundred minutes in the hour? Twenty hours in the day. No, it would not work and this is perhaps one of the few places where the Friends of Twelve can feel confident.
There was also a complicated explanation of why twelve was used for time. It was an explanation to hard for me to follow fully, as a bloke who failed maths in Form Four at Drouin High.
The very ancient Egyptians used a 24-hour day about one and a half millennia ago. Apparently they had observed that the year had 12 lunar cycles – ie, full moon to full and that each day was divided, at least roughly, into two phases, day and night. It is also possible that this thinking was based on the appearance of 12 different constellations in sequence every night.
A bloke named Hipparchus, a Greek mathematician, realised at some stage between 120 and 50 BC that the two equinoxes, vernal and autumnal appeared each year and thy they had 12 hours of light and 12 of dark.
Remember that this was all long before Rolex and Omega were created.
Some calendars have used 13 months for the year, but that never took off.
Twelve has more factors, numbers that can be divided into without using fractions, than any other number – what Wikipedia, I think it was, said 12 is divisible by two, three, four, six and 12. Ten has only three. Sixty is five twelves and is the Wikipedia advises us, with a perfectly straight face, that "both twelve and sixty are the smallest two numbers to "share the property that they have more divisors than any number smaller than themselves". I hope you're clear on that.
Now, in the army we were taught to use mils instead of degrees for giving directions. Many of us came in knowing all about compasses and the 360 degrees (30 times 12) that made up a circle, and the 180 degrees in a triangle but suddenly there were 6200 of them, almost too small to see.
The word mil is short for milliradian and is a thousandth of a radian. If you want to convert it to degrees you'll have to do it yourself. The formula is 9/50 times Pi = -057296 of a degree.
Degrees hang around multiples of 12. Mils do not belong in the real world, which is why officers used them so much, I think. "Left a bit, bit more… near enough, Fire!"
There were 12 apostles until Judas Iscariot did the wrong thing. We often still include him in the 12, but surely there should have been only 11 after his betrayal of Christ. Our own Twelve Apostles is now down to seven, unless we've lost another one overnight. There must be dozens of tourists from other countries who count them and then wonder where the other five have gone.
Now, the twelves in time. Next week.