Today, watches underpin everything we do, from work to school to sleep. Timekeeping is also the invisible fabric that makes modern infrastructure work. It forms the basis for high-speed computers that conduct financial transactions and GPS systems that locate locations on the surface of the earth with unprecedented accuracy.
But humans may have lived according to some version of the clock for a very long time. Ancient Egyptians invented the first water clocks and sundials over 3,500 years ago. According to Rita Gauthier, an archaeological astronomer at the University of Basel, before that time was tracked by devices not documented in the archaeological record, such as upright poles of earth that acted as primitive sundials. , you may not have used the device at all. of Switzerland.
“When people started timing, it was really hard to keep track of,” says Gautschy. By simply observing the positions of sunrise and sunset each day and observing how high the sun reaches in the sky, one can create a protocalendar. These early human efforts to understand the passage of time left no trace, she says.
The oldest recorded sundial came from Egypt and was made around 1500 BC. It consisted of a simple upright bar and a roughly semicircular base divided into 12 pie-shaped sections. Other early sundials measured time by the length of the shadow of the pole as the sun moved across the sky, and the movement of the shadow across the base. No, says Gautschy.
“This is the first step. Once you’ve completed this step, you can fine-tune it and even adapt to different moons,” she says. For a sundial to be truly accurate, both time and latitude must be considered.
During the night, ancient people could track time by the apparent movement of the stars from east to west, Gauchy says. They used water clocks to measure discrete units of time. These were vessels with holes for the water to flow out at a constant rate, or vessels filled with water from another vessel and marked on the inside to indicate the increments of time. The oldest surviving water clocks were found in Egypt and Babylon, with the earliest dating to around 1500 BC. According to Chinese historical records, the water clock was invented by the Yellow Emperor, a half-historical, half-mythological figure. Zheng-Hui Hwang, a mechanical engineer at Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University who has written about the history of ancient Chinese timekeeping devices, states that he lived between 2717 BC and 2599 BC.The earliest Chinese water clocks were probably spill devices and were known as look. unit of We divided the day into 100 equal segments from midnight to midnight. Hwang said the inventors spent time making these clocks more sophisticated, equipping them with multiple water reservoirs and adjusting the water flow rate to be consistent.
Water eventually leads to very sophisticated timekeeping.By the early 700s AD, Tang Dynasty monks had developed mechanical clocks powered by waterwheels.In 1194, Song Dynasty official Su Song , based on this design, developed a mechanical clock powered by a 40-foot (12-meter) high water wheel. .
The ancient Chinese timekeeping system also divided the 24-hour day into two-hour units. This system was also found in ancient Japan and Korea, according to a 2004 paper. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.
In modern times, the length of an hour is always the same, but ancient peoples around the world used a more complex system. About Time: The History of Civilizations in 12 Clocks (WW Norton, 2021). Some ancient timekeeping systems divided the bright part of the day into 12 segments and the night into 12 segments, but since the length of day and night varies throughout the year except at the equator, these The “seasonal time” had different lengths for day and night. throughout the year.
“If your religion calls for prayer times associated with sunrises and sunsets, etc., or if you work in the fields as most people did in those days, the pattern of day and night is a universal time. It’s more important than the idea that,” says Rooney. .
According to Rooney, seasonal and universal time coexisted in Europe until the 15th century and in Japan until the 19th century. “We used to live with a much more complex, rich and diverse ephemeral culture,” he adds.
Religion has been a major driver of the standardization of time across cultures, both throughout the year and in everyday life, says Gautschy. In ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia (the equivalent of present-day Iraq and Turkey), and Greece, people developed lunar calendars to keep track of ceremonies and holidays, while the Egyptians focused more on solar calendars, with a calendar based on the star Sirius. According to Rooney, people in Islamic cultures used water clocks to keep track of their prayers and fasts, while Christians used mechanical clocks as a way to schedule their prayers in 14th-century Europe. Developed.
In short, humans were transitory creatures for much longer than the industrial age, but they weren’t always happy. The Roman playwright Plautus, he says, opposed the new fad of time management through a character in one of his plays. —Who first set up a sundial here and shredded the day for poor me! You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial. There was, and was far superior to all of these.. But what we have now is not edible unless the sun says so. of people crawling around, hungry and wrinkled. “
2,200 years old is a surprisingly modern concept, Rooney says. “It was written in the 21st century and could be told in any office,” he says.
