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History of the Minute and the Hour
The Egyptians were one of the first groups to document the calculation of time. They allotted 12 hours for nighttime, 10 hours for the duration of daylight and two hours for nightfall (sunset). These allotments added up to 24 hours for each day. The Babylonians developed a simpler system that allotted 60 minutes per hour. They also determined there to be 60 seconds per minute.
Converting Minutes to Hours
There are 60 minutes in one hour. To convert any minutes to hours, divide your total number of minutes by 60. For example, if you want to know how many hours 560 minutes is, divide 600 by 60. The answer is 10. There are 600 minutes in 10 hours.
Converting Decimal Numbers to Hours
Even though there is no equation to determine exact number of minutes from decimal numbers, you can use these basic guidelines to estimate an approximate number of minutes. Just as 60 minutes can be divided evenly into quarters (four equal sections), so can decimal numbers. After you've divided total number of minutes by 60, numbers before the decimal equal the number of hours. Numbers ending in 0.25 corresponds to 15 minutes. Likewise, 0.5 corresponds to 30 minutes and 0.75 to 45 minutes. You can round a number up or down to the nearest minute when you have a decimal number that falls within any of these four increments.
Converting Hours to Minutes
To calculate the total minutes within a number of hours, multiply the number of total hours by 60. For example, if you want to know how many minutes are in five hours, multiply 5 by 60. There are 300 minutes in five hours.
Converting Decimal Numbers to Minutes
When you are converting from hours to minutes, the number of hours will very rarely be written as a decimal number. Therefore, the resulting number of minutes will generally be a whole number. If any hour were to be written as a decimal number, these numbers would most commonly end in 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75; each of these corresponds to a whole number of minutes.