Why Do Clocks And Watches With Roman Numerals On Them Use IIII Instead of IV For 4?

Every schoolchild knows (or should know) that the number 4 in Roman numerals is IV. So why do clocks and watches that show the time in Roman numerals almost always use IIII for 4? (Take a look at the photo below of the clock tower atop the Ferry Building in San Francisco.) All the other numbers are shown correctly in Roman numerals. Only 4 is wrong, and it is wrong on most clocks and watches. It doesn’t seem to matter when or where the clock or watch was made. This has been going on for a long time. European clock makers have been using IIII for 4 for centuries. We don’t know who started this practice or when. There are a lot of theories about this, including conspiracy theories involving the Freemasons, the Illuminati, King Louis XIV of France, and the Pope. (There are a lot of wacky conspiracy theories floating around on the internet about the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and the Pope, but not many about Louis XIV.) One theory that has a lot of internet followers right now is that the Romans started putting IIII on clocks instead of IV as a way of honoring Jupiter (the god, not the planet). The problem with this theory is that mechanical clocks weren’t invented until centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. However, the Romans made sundials with Roman numerals on them, so I suppose it is possible that the Romans started this practice themselves. I don’t know what the Romans put on their sundials for the number 4.

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So what is the explanation? I have always been a firm believer in Occam’s Razor which states that the most obvious solution to any problem is usually the correct one. The most obvious explanation here is that clock makers started putting IIII on clock faces simply to avoid confusion. It is very easy to confuse IV with VI, or 4 for 6 on a clock face. The number 6 on a clock face is at the bottom and therefore upside down. By writing the number 4 as IIII, it can’t be confused for another number.

A lot of what people think they know about ancient Rome isn’t true. That all comes from Hollywood of course. Many of the most expensive and memorable movies ever made were about Rome. While movies about gladiators and deranged emperors are fun to watch, they are usually extremely inaccurate. One of the first movies I ever saw was about gladiators. It was a Saturday matinee at the Forest Theater in Baltimore. The movie scared me, which is why I remembered it. The gladiators in this movie were fighting dinosaurs in the Colosseum. Even though I was only about 8 years old at the time, I recall that I had serious doubts about the historic accuracy of this movie. Hollywood studios put dinosaurs into all sorts of movies back in those days. Remember Godzilla? gwangi1Westerns were very popular in the 1950s, so Hollywood sometimes put dinosaurs in them too. My favorite dinosaur Western was ‘The Valley of Gwangi’ in which cowboys on horseback chased down really big dinosaurs and then lassoed and hogtied them. I don’t remember why they were doing that.  Below is a still shot from this movie. In this scene, the cowboys are taking a lassoed dinosaur off to market.

As I often tell my students – it is important to remember when you are watching movies about real historic people and historic times that Hollywood is in the entertainment business, not the education business.

P.S. – I am pretty sure that Roman gladiators did not fight with dinosaurs, but I will try to get confirmation of that from my Latin-teaching cousins in Cincinnati.

Why Do German Directors Wear Monocles?

vonStroheimBack in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood’s Golden Age, many of the top directors in the U.S. were Germans. Most of them moved to Hollywood when Hitler came to power; however, some important German directors in Hollywood arrived long before the Nazi era. Erich von Stroheim was a big movie star in the U.S. during World War 1. He was the first German actor in Hollywood to figure out that the way to get jobs directing big-budget movies was to act the role of a stereotypical German theatrical director. He knew that Americans had a very clear idea what German directors were like. Americans thought that German directors were arrogant monocled tyrants, terrorizing the people who worked under them, but that they were also artistic geniuses. Von Stroheim knew how to play to that stereotype. He starred in many big-budget movies in World War 1 and World War 2, always playing a nasty, arrogant, monocled German military officer. American audiences lapped it up! Von Stroheim was billed as ‘the man you love to hate.’ Von Stroheim began wearing a monocle soon after arriving in Hollywood, but he didn’t actually need glasses to see. The lens in von Stroheim’s monocle was just window glass. He wore the monocle as part of his theatrical personae. Twenty years after von Stroheim arrived in Hollywood, Hitler came to power, and a slew of top German directors moved to Hollywood, most of them Jewish, and all of them looking for work. Two of the best of these Jewish German directors were Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang. Both of them knew Erich von Stroheim. Soon after arriving in Hollywood, both Preminger and Lang started wearing monocles. Neither of them wore monocles when they lived in Germany. They also began sneering when being photographed. Like von Stroheim, they quickly got jobs directing important movies. My favorite movie directed by Otto Preminger was  ‘Laura.’ It has often been called the best cinema noir movie ever made. Preminger won the Academy Award in 1944 as Best Director for that film. He also acted in a number of movies. In ‘Stalag 17’, Preminger played the arrogant, sadistic commandant of a German POW  camp. In that movie, Preminger plays with his monocle while tormenting American POWs. So, if you know someone with a German accent who wants to become a big-name Hollywood director, my advice is – start sneering and get a monocle!