Great question. It would be great to have it in an easy to remember system of tens, yes!

http://segatech.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/wall_clock.jpg

I LOVE CLOCK HUMOR!!

QUOTE Breaking an Hour Into Minutes
You know that there are twenty-four (24) hours in a day. Twelve of those hours are in the a.m. and twelve are in the p.m. It's nice to know about hours, but the world needed a smaller division of time. We needed minutes. There are sixty (60) minutes in each hour. The value of sixty has its origins in the Babylonian counting system. They had a system that worked with a base of sixty. If we created time today, there is a chance we would have one hundred (100) smaller minutes for each hour.

When you look at the face of a clock, you will see the major division for the hours. There are also smaller notches that represent the minutes. You will find four notches between each hour division. There are also quick ways of telling someone the number of minutes. You could say "Four forty-five" or the faster way… "A quarter to five." Here are some of the abbreviations:

Quarter After: Fifteen minutes past the hour. (Quarter after three = 3:15)
Half Past: Thirty minutes past the hour. (Half past four = 4:30)
Quarter To: Fifteen minutes before the next hour. (Quarter to eight = 7:45)
QUOTE

http://www.numbernut.com/basic/dates_minutes.shtml
There are good theories here:

http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/t/time.htm

has some good theories and
Source(s):
mentioned above

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