1 hour in seconds

Result

The conversion result is: 1 hour is equivalent to 3600 seconds.^[1]

Conversion in the opposite direction

The inverse of the conversion factor is that 1 second is equal to 0.000277777777777778 times 1 hour.

It can also be expressed as: 1 hour is equal to 1 / 0.000277777777777778 seconds.

Approximation

An approximate numerical result would be: one hour is about three thousand, six hundred seconds, or alternatively, a second is about zero times one hour.

Units involved

This is how the units in this conversion are defined:

Hours

"Midnight (or noon) on a 12-hour analog clock An hour is a unit of time conventionally reckoned as 1⁄24 of a day and scientifically reckoned as 3,599–3,601 seconds, depending on conditions.The seasonal, temporal, or unequal hour was established in the ancient Near East as 1⁄12 of the night or daytime. Such hours varied by season, latitude, and weather. It was subsequently divided into 60 minutes, each of 60 seconds. Its East Asian equivalent was the shi, which was 1⁄12 of the apparent solar day; a similar system was eventually developed in Europe which measured its equal or equinoctial hour as 1⁄24 of such days measured from noon to noon. The minor variations of this unit were eventually smoothed by making it 1⁄24 of the mean solar day, based on the measure of the suns transit along the celestial equator rather than along the ecliptic. This was finally abandoned due to the minor slowing caused by the Earths tidal deceleration by the Moon.In the modern metric system, hours are an accepted unit of time equal to 3,600 seconds but an hour of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) may incorporate a positive or negative leap second,[a] making it last 3,599 or 3,601 seconds, in order to keep it within 0.9 seconds of universal time, which is based on measurements of the mean solar day at 0° longitude."

Seconds

"The second (symbol s) is the base unit of time in the International System of Units. It is qualitatively defined as the second division of the hour by sixty, the first division by sixty being the minute.[3] SI definition of second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. Seconds may be measured using a mechanical, electrical or an atomic clock. SI prefixes are combined with the word second to denote subdivisions of the second, e.g., the millisecond (one thousandth of a second), the microsecond (one millionth of a second), and the nanosecond (one billionth of a second). Though SI prefixes may also be used to form multiples of the second such as kilosecond (one thousand seconds), such units are rarely used in practice. The more common larger non-SI units of time are not formed by powers of ten; instead, the second is multiplied by 60 to form a minute, which is multiplied by 60 to form an hour, which is multiplied by 24 to form a day. The second is also the base unit of time in other systems of measurement the centimetre–gram–second, metre–kilogram–second, metre–tonne–second, and foot–pound–second systems of units."

Footnotes

[1] The precision is 15 significant digits (fourteen digits to the right of the decimal point).

Results may contain small errors due to the use of floating point arithmetic.