Seconds to Hours (s to h)
1 second equals 0.0002777777778 hours (rounded).
How to convert seconds to hours
To convert seconds to hours, multiply the number of seconds by 0.0002777777778. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply hours by 3,600.
hours = seconds × 0.0002777777778
Example: 10 seconds = 0.002777777778 hours.
Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.
About these units
Second (s)
The SI base unit of time, defined by the radiation frequency of the cesium-133 atom: 9,192,631,770 cycles per second.
Our word second is a leftover of Latin. Medieval scholars divided a degree, and later the hour, into 60 parts called pars minuta prima, the first small part, and divided those again into pars minuta secunda, the second small part. NIST traces the roots further back: Babylonian and Greek astronomers split the circle into 360 degrees, and around 150 C.E. Ptolemy split each degree into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. Clocks that could show seconds appeared only in the later 16th century, and Christiaan Huygens's pendulum clock of 1656 was the first able to keep time accurately to the second.
For most of history the second was a fraction of a day, and in 1956 it was redefined as a fraction of the tropical year, a definition the SI took over in 1960. In 1967 the 13th CGPM switched to atoms: 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation tied to a hyperfine transition of caesium-133. The 2019 SI revision restated this by fixing the caesium frequency at 9,192,631,770 hertz. NIST reports that commercial caesium clocks stay within about a three-millionth of a second per year, and experimental clocks based on other atoms are roughly ten thousand times more precise.
The second is the reference unit for time on this site.
Sources: NIST: the second and the SI redefinition; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition; Wikipedia: Second
Hour (h)
60 minutes or 3,600 seconds, one twenty-fourth of a mean solar day.
Egyptian astronomers gave us the twelve. Coffin lids from about 2150 BC show the night divided into exactly 12 intervals, tied to the rising of star groups called decans, and the day was later split into 12 hours with sundials. These were seasonal hours, a twelfth of the daylight, so a summer hour was longer than a winter one. The word itself comes from Greek hora, originally any span of time, through Latin and Old French into English in the 13th century.
Equal hours of 1/24 of a day were probably first proposed by Hipparchus, and mechanical clocks made them the practical choice, since a clock showing seasonal hours had to be readjusted every morning and evening. Today the hour is exactly 3,600 seconds and is a non-SI unit accepted for use with the SI. Civil time still bends it a little: UTC hours have lasted 3,601 seconds 27 times since 1972 to keep clocks within 0.9 seconds of the Earth's rotation. In practice we use it for working shifts, travel times and electricity bills measured in kilowatt-hours.
1 hour = 3,600 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Hour; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition
Related conversions
- Hours to seconds (reverse)
- Seconds to minutes
- Seconds to days
- Seconds to weeks
- Seconds to months
- Seconds to years
- Seconds to milliseconds
- Seconds to microseconds
- Seconds to nanoseconds
- Seconds to decades
- Seconds to centuries
- Seconds to millennia
- Seconds to picoseconds
- Minutes to hours
- Days to hours
- Weeks to hours
- Months to hours
- Years to hours
- Milliseconds to hours
- Microseconds to hours
- Nanoseconds to hours
- Decades to hours
- Centuries to hours
- Millennia to hours
- Picoseconds to hours
See all time units.