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Welcome to Becoming Sage, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary!
Welcome to Becoming Sage, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary! My name is Elan Baumgarten. This episode will take you through the history of time. Well, not the history of time, but the history of time-keeping. How humans have used different tools throughout the ages to keep track of the hours in the day, the days in the months, and the months in the years! Throughout the ages people have used several different methods to keep track of their seasons. One of the oldest are the natural calendars, measured with the progression of the moon’s phases. These were first used by bronze age civilizations like the Babylonians and the Persians. The issue with these natural calendars is that they aren’t actually even. Days are actually 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds. Months and years aren’t exact either! The Egyptians were the first to just set their calendar on a specific amount of days - 30. That set them in line with the solar calendar instead of trying to match their dates with that of the lunar phases. The modern calendar’s first direct ancestor was actually created by Julius Caesar’s commission. They kept the Egyptian leap year, with each month containing either 30 or 31 days. February of course had only 28, and the year was March to February instead of January to December. The months of today’s calendar also derive their names from the gods of Ancient Rome. March is for Mars, the Roman god of war and May is for Maia, the Roman’s earth goddess. While this calendar was quite similar to today’s, it isn’t exactly the same. The calendar that spans the globe in 2024 is the Gregorian Calendar, and it has been in use since Pope Gregory invented it in 1582, although it took many countries decades to adopt it. Many protestant countries changed within a few decades, but Islamic countries like Greece and Turkey didn’t adopt the calendar until the early 20th Century. Now that you know how the calendar came to be, you might still be interested in how we count our days. The evolution of clocks as they came to be the tools we use today. The current time-keeping method utilizes a base-60 counting system. 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour. This comes from Ancient Sumeria over 4,000 years ago. While one of the most famous designs of ancient time-keeping was the sundial, which measured time using shadows from the sun’s rays hitting a stick in the middle of a circle, there were actually a number of fascinating clocks designed in ages long passed. For instance, the widely used water clocks which measured time using water flow, certain time passing at different intervals of a container filling with water. There were a number of other methods used around the globe including the time stick and the candle clock, which was used primarily in Asia but also in Mesopotamia and England. It is believed that the water clock was pushed to the edge of 11th Century engineering using gears to create a geared water clock in Islamic controlled Iberia.
Mechanical clocks were invented in the early 1300s in Europe by Christian monks. The Renaissance produced a wide variety of different mechanical clocks as the tools that went from being displayed in public places started to gain value as a domestic tool found in the homes of those who could afford them. They also became smaller and, albeit slightly, more portable. Advances in clock designing continued through the next two or so centuries as they became status symbols for nobility. Wall clocks, tabletop clocks, and mantel clocks all became widely associated with status. Pendulum clocks a century later in 1656. The man who created the pendulum clock was a Dutch scientist by the name of Christiaan Huygens. It remained the most precise time-keeping instrument until the 1930s. Interestingly enough, pendulum clocks were actually made less accurate by a wider swing, so designers limited it to 4-6 degrees instead of a hundred. The Royal Pendulum became quite popular, each swing indicating a second passed, and the grandfather clock was a large pendulum clock housed in a wooden case. It became the next status symbol and remains an incredibly popular timekeeping choice in Europe today. As history moved into the 1700s, so did clock making. Clock makers decorated their clocks with new ornate designs and further pushed it into the role of a luxury item. Porcelain and ormolu were used to decorate the clocks. In the year 1675 horology, the art of making clocks and studying time, took a new massive leap forward. Robert Hooke, alongside the inventor of the pendulum clock, created the hairspring. This allowed pocket watches, the first truly mobile timekeeping device, to be created. Thomas Tompion is the man who was able to create pocket watches successfully. He also added the minute hand, which gave us the same analog clock configuration that we use to this day. Alexander Bain invented the very first electrical clock in 1840, marking the next step in horology’s evolution. The British Watch Company was the first to mass produce watches in 1843, but the U.S. took the game up a notch and kicked off the manufacturing of pocket watches on a whole other level. As the years turned from the 18th to the 19th Century wristwatches started to gain popularity. Instead of a classy watch that one slips into their pocket, this watch was always accessible with just a glance. These were primarily worn by women, as pocket watches didn’t fall out of fashion until into the 20th Century. In 1957 the Hamilton Electric 500 was born. It was the first electric watch to be sold, as well as the first that didn’t need to be wound. The Hamilton watch company had been producing them in Pennsylvania since 1947. In the 1970s the world saw something called the “Quartz Revolution”, noting the creation of the quartz watch. They function with a battery that causes a quartz crystal to pulse at a steady interval. The pulses move the watch’s hands. Today there are a number of watches available, from analog to digital, even to smart watches which contain the technology of a phone. Today most watch wearers have smart watches, but some continue to hold on to the mechanical watch. My name is Elan Baumgarten and thank you for listening to Becoming Sage, where the ordinary becomes truly extraordinary! Make sure to tune in next week for another case of the extraordinary masked in ordinary!