How We First Started to Tell the Time

!9# How We First Started to Tell the Time

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The importance of time is universal and eternal. The necessity to be aware of the daily timing was known even to primitive men. Although they did not know anything about time, but had devised their timetables according to days and nights.

Unlike following some nocturnal animals, they copied the general routine of other animals that used day as the working time and night as the resting time. Additionally, human beings also adopted the more 'humane' attitude where they started to observe some schedule or timetable in their daily lives.

This observance of timetable ultimately gives rise to a need to keep count of the time and date. That was the time when these ancestors of modern human beings started keeping track of time. They started using the movement of the sun and the moon and observing the location of the stars to calculate the time. People started observing the shadows of the sun and calculated the time as per the position of the shadow.

This phenomenon ultimately gave way to sundial clock. This is one of the earliest recorded clocks in human history. A sundial clock was simply an object (iron or wooden rod) placed in sun with some markings that indicated the time. People used to calculate the time as per the direction and size of the shadow cast by this rod.

This continued for many centuries along with the calculation of time looking at the physical indicators of the day or night. However, people felt the need for a more accurate time keeping device at that time. Both sundial and physical indicators to calculate time were ineffective and almost inaccurate. They needed some more advanced methods to calculate time.

This need ultimately gave rise to the invention of hourglass. Hourglass was a simple device that used two small glass chambers connected with each other and used sand as the time measuring device. Finely crushed sand used to come down from the top glass chamber to the bottom one. This usually took an hour. Once the bottom chamber was full, it was turned upside down and time counting started again through the falling of sand.

People soon got bored of the hourglass even. They termed it as an old device that required a lot of manual work in turning it upside down repeatedly. They wanted an automatic system to tell time. The search for a perfect medium ultimately led them to modern day clocks. Earliest versions of clocks were much bigger and heavier than modern day ones.

They used a complicated system of mechanics, pendulums and oscillators to measure time. The bigger size gradually started shrinking with time. Wristwatches became the order of the day and old mechanical clocks gave way to modern digital clocks. Now you can even measure accurate milliseconds and nanoseconds by using an atomic clock. The precise time keeping is no more considered a difficult task and all this was made possible due to inquisitive nature of humans.