Seconds to Ship's Watches (s to watch)
1 second equals 0.00006944444444 ship's watches (rounded).
How to convert seconds to ship's watches
To convert seconds to ship's watches, multiply the number of seconds by 0.00006944444444. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply ship's watches by 14,400.
ship's watches = seconds × 0.00006944444444
Example: 10 seconds = 0.0006944444444 ship's watches.
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
Ship's Watch (watch)
Four hours, the standard duty period at sea. The 'dog watches' of the evening are split into two hours each.
Naval and merchant crews divide the day into watches so that the ship is never left unattended. A normal watch lasts four hours, and its length is the basis for the figure used here, 14,400 seconds. The traditional scheme described by Wikipedia had five four-hour watches and two two-hour dog watches, named the first, middle, morning, forenoon and afternoon watches, with the afternoon watch ending at 1600.
Splitting the 1600 to 2000 period into a first and second dog watch gives an odd number of watches per day, so each crew member's schedule shifts from day to day, and it also lets everyone eat an evening meal. Time on board is marked with the ship's bell, struck every half hour so that eight bells ends a four-hour watch. Merchant ships typically keep six four-hour watches instead, which makes the pattern consistent.
1 ship's watch = 14,400 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Watchkeeping; Wikipedia: Ship's bell
Related conversions
- Ship's watches to seconds (reverse)
- Seconds to minutes
- Seconds to hours
- 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
- Minutes to ship's watches
- Hours to ship's watches
- Days to ship's watches
- Weeks to ship's watches
- Months to ship's watches
- Years to ship's watches
See all time units.