How did military time originated?

Answer 1

The military, out of necessity uses real time. There are 24 hours in a day; therefore the military uses what civilians call "military time", it's not military time...it's real time. But since only the military uses it (more and more civilians, e.g. law enforcement, etc. are beginning to use it) people call it "Military Time." 0001 Hours is one minute past midnight. 0100 Hours is one hour past midnight; or 1 o'clock in the morning, or 1 AM. The 24 hours method is more accurate, easier to say, easier to remember, and doesn't cause confusion. Battlefield's are confusing enough without adding more complications to it.

Answer 2

The British Royal Navy adopted the 24-hour clock in 1915, and the other Allied armed forces followed soon after..- it is not actually called "military time" and in the British forces at least, it has been known as "Zulu time" since the early 1960's

Answer 3

Actually, what many Americans call "Military Time" (which is primarily used and called that in the United States & Canada), is a simply a perversion of the Official World Standard time (ISO 8601), used in most of the world (esp in Europe).

Whereas, Americans prefer the AM (Ante-Meri-dian) & PM (Post Meri-dian) approach, which simply means Before Mid-Day (Noon) & Post Mid-Day in Latin; the rest of the world actually uses the standard 24-hour clock, in which case a person can't be confused as to which part of the day it is after asking for the time (perhaps in casinos, or other places where there few or no windows).

Why do we call military time a "perversion"? Because the way it's used. When you ask what time it is and it's 1 O'Clock, that would be 100 in military time, but what is ½ (half) of that? well, we know that 50 is ½ of 100, but now we'd come to a problem! It's perverted and confused by taking something that is 60 units based and applying it to something that is 100 unit based.

"Military Time" is generally used slightly different from the proper 24-hour clock, by omitting the colon ":" which separates the hours from the minutes and by consistently making it 4-digits long by adding a "0" to the front when the hour portion is less than 10.

The Canadian armed forces first started to use the 24-hour clock in 1917.

The the US Navy in 1920 & the US Army in 1942. Shortly after lazy American Soldiers began to bastardize the system, by saying things like 0800 (Zero Eight Hundred) instead of 8 O'Clock or 1600 instead of 16 O'Clock, etc.... This verbal corruption eventually spread and became so commonly used by other US Military branches, that it became known as "Military Time".