Time’s fun when you’re having flies.
Kate Stockholm
With thanks to Kermit the Frog… My friends were talking the other day about clocks. I found it amazing that the 12-hour clock is the same pretty much everywhere in the world. Even in odd, remote cultures like Italy. Why do people who can’t agree on anything else agree on time?
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. Douglas Adams
Passage of time was first measured by shadows. This only worked during daylight. And it wasn’t very exact. The amount of daylight varied with weather and time of year. Ancient egyptians measured how long it took to transition from day to night (dusk). It was discovered it took the same amount of time to go from night to day (dawn). They called the interval an “hour”. They also figured out there were 24 of them in a day (and 365 days in a year, but that’s another story).
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. Groucho Marx
The Babylonians adopted this 24 hour day concept but needed more precision for their astrological observations. Since they had a base-60 counting system (don’t ask), they divided the hour into 60
minutes and a minute into 60 seconds. Modern positioning of stars today is still notated in hours:minutes:seconds. We have the Romans to thank for the completely illogical double 12 hour system.
Certainly one of the major confusions is noon and midnight. How exactly noon can be 12AM and midnight 12PM… I will never know.
I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time. Marilyn Monroe
Northern Europe, where all work on mechanizing and making time pieces portible occured, used either Roman numerals or a new numeric system which had some really spiffy properties like “zero” and positional notation. It came from the Hindus through the middle east via trade. The word “clock” itself comes from the french/celtic/dutch word for “bell”.
Well, you know know as much about clocks as I do. I hope you enjoyed reading this little article as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please feel free to leave comments and corrections.
