Thanks to clocks we are late

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, May 13, 2008

“What time is it?” How many times have you asked and heard that question? How about: “Time is running out?” There’s a phrase that connects to mankind’s first attempt to measure the passing of time by using an “hour” glass, which was filled with dry sand, and tipped over to restart again.

Although we understood well the need for a calendar of days, weeks, and months, even that took until the 13th century to come near to bringing some order to what is now our calendar. But the day’s contents itself? That was much more difficult. Man remained a slave to the sun to tell the passing of the day, and was completely adrift on cloudy days and at night.

The “dial” of your watch? That term is a leftover reference to the first way we told time—the sundial, which measured a shadow, really. The first folks who really motivated the development of a mechanical means of measuring time were religious clergy, who, in a time when devotion was high, needed to know regularly when to perform their devotion to God.

Since the church bell had up to then been the signal for religious clergy to perform their devotions — which happened several times during the day and night — the very first clocks were designed not to be seen, but to be heard; to “tell” time.

The very word “clock” comes from the Dutch word “Glocke,” which means “bell.” No timekeeping device was considered as such unless it rang a bell. Well, except for an enterprising Frenchman who positioned a magnifying lens precisely so that the noon sun focused the sun’s rays on the fuse of a cannon, which then fired.

There was another reason why clocks were heard, and not seen. This was a primarily illiterate population who would not have been able to “tell” time anyway. And besides, when it got dark, you went to bed. Only the very wealthy could afford candles; everyone else slept.

For the first time, clocks began to show mankind that it could conquer nighttime by measuring it, dividing it, and assigning fixed behavior to fixed hours. Up to now, time was more something that just flowed past, like a river. Now, however, fixed times could be referred to as, for example, nine of the clock, or: nine o’clock.

The first “day,” as described in Genesis: “The evening and the morning were the first day.” Now mankind had to define when a day began, before it could even consider dividing it up. The very first day appears to begin at night, and so it did for some time. Some religions began their day at daybreak. Some began it at nightfall. Western clocks are based on days where night and day are equal, with each “half” divided up into 12 units.

The English word “day” comes from a Latin word “to burn,” which also meant the “hot time,” or hot season. Our word “hour” comes from Latin and Greek words meaning “time of day,” at a time in history when “hour” referred to one-twelfth of daylight hours.

As for the 24-hour division, it is theorized that the Egyptians divided their day into 24ths, based on the ancient Babylonians counting system of units of six. Six hours in the morning; six in the afternoon, and so forth.

Now we’re to the minute, or “mi-nute (small)” part of something. This gets much fuzzier. The Egyptians used 360 days as their year, and, perhaps to some parallel with their year, began to divide circles up into 360 parts. “Sixty,” as one-sixth of 360, which was natural for a bunch of folks who counted stuff in groups of six, was a significant number, and somehow became the number of “mi-nute,” or small, parts of an hour. It is an interesting sidelight here to point out that the small circle, which is now used as a symbol for “degree,” was the Egyptian symbol for the sun, a symbol which they adapted from the ancient Babylonians.

The “minute,” which was originally used to divide the circle up further, eventually became attached to telling time. It divided itself into 60 seconds, again because of the accepted Babylonian method of counting everything in bunches of six. (No one knows exactly why, apparently.)

So. We owe our calendar to ancient Egyptian priests, our days to Greek and Roman astrologers, our hours to Babylonian counting methods, and our minutes and seconds to not only the Babylonians but to the first Europeans to finally invent a mechanical clock that “ticked” the seconds.

Although Western civilization is credited with the first clocks, in fact the Chinese had invented them, regarded them as a pain in the butt, and discarded them by somewhere around the fourth or fifth century.

It’s pretty easy to admire them for that. Modern civilization invented the word “late,” thanks to clocks.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.