The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I am the reason you are late, and I have never once moved.
For most of history I had only one hand, and that was considered plenty.
I turn the way I do because that is how a shadow moves in the northern hemisphere.
Some of me stand in towers, some sit on wrists, and some now exist only on screens.
Twelve numbers, two hands, and a quiet tick.
Clock
The word clockwise exists only because sundials in the northern hemisphere throw their shadows that way. Built in Australia, time would run backwards.
For its first three centuries the mechanical clock had one hand and was accurate to perhaps fifteen minutes a day, which was fine, because nothing in ordinary life needed more. Christiaan Huygens fitted a pendulum in 1656 and cut the error to seconds; only then did a minute hand become worth adding. Even so, every town kept its own noon until the railways arrived. Trains could not run on a hundred local times, so Britain imposed a single one in the 1840s and the United States followed in 1883. Standard time was not a scientific discovery. It was a timetable problem.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #1 · today's mystery · the vault