Random thought for the day

I was USAF flight crew on C-130-E Hercules aircraft in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Almost all aircrew briefing rooms had 2 clocks with numbers like the first one below. One of them was marked ZULU TIME and the other was marked LOCAL. All aircrew were issued a watch with glow in the dark numbers and a face like the dark one below. They had 12 and 24 hour markings on the face. The watches were all analog and had to be wound by turning the stem. There were no digital clocks or watches at that time. The first digital clocks or watches I ever saw were in Japan in about 1972 or '73. I do not know when digital watches and clocks first appeared on the USA mainland. I was in the Pacific from 1970 to late 1973. Hickam AFB was the Eastern most island our area of operations covered. We would get into some of the International Airports in Alaska at times, but only saw the military ramp with a few hangers where we loaded and off-loaded pallets of various supplies.

Bfromla said:

Sorry, I honestly don’t know. It was a screen shot from a random YouTube - Feb last year. Probably had a funny conversation about appointments; clocks; time in general; & it happened to catch my eye.
I do have small album dedicated for such - some funny, some interesting. Hopefully you're keeping up with the random thoughts...

Click to expand...

The Kanji Clocks which I mentioned before were fairly common in most of the local cities and towns of most any of the countries and islands which spoke Japanese or Chinese. The simplified ancient symbols for the numbers were the same in Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. The simplified symbols were used to allow for import/export without having a different clock face. The 3 languages are not the same in modern speaking or written forms, but the languages all originated from the ancient numbers and most citizens of those countries who were able to read did understand the simplified numbers. The Kanji Clocks were also common in other Southeast Asian countries where Chinese or Japanese was one of the several languages spoken and many of the citizens spoke several different languages or dialects.