Do you know who started the concept of time?
and from where has it evolved over?
Welcome to thought ctrl and today we have all about the concept of Time!
The first homo sapiens already walked the earth nearly 300 000 years ago. Yet, humans have barely been measuring 1% of that entire period. Historical records claim that the Babylonians already made use of sundials as early as 3500 BC. They used these clocks to divide the period between sunrise and sunset into hours.
Accuracy clearly wasn’t their main concern. Due to the path of the Earth around the sun, the length of their hours changed with the seasons. Fast forward a few thousand years and we find much more accurate timekeeping tools such as water clocks, candle clocks and hourglasses all over the world.
Major highlights came in the 14th and 19th century with the introduction of the mechanical clock and electric clock respectively. However, even at this point, there still wasn’t any kind of uniformly agreed time.
Different cities ran at different times. This lasted until 1880, when Britain was the first country to change this by implementing a standard time zone that is Greenwich Mean Time GMT across the entire country in order to improve the consistency of the railways.
The final major breakthrough came in the 1940’s with the introduction of the atomic clock, whose oscillation is regulated by the natural vibration frequency of a cesium atom. This allowed us to set an official standard for time that is stable and precise.
One second measures exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium-133 atom. This kind of clock is so stable and precise, it only deviates 1 second per 100 million years.
So What time is it?
To this day, the coordinated universal time (UTC) is defined by two components:
1. The International Atomic Time (TAI): A combined output of 400 highly precise atomic clocks
2. The Universal Time (UT1): The astronomical time, defined by the Earth’s rotation.
This TAI is both a blessing and a curse, because now humans have become more precise than Earth itself. In reality, the length of a day changes gradually, because Earth’s rotation is gently slowing down.
Every few months, when the time difference between the TAI and UT1 has grown to 0,9 seconds, a leap second is introduced to give Earth a second to catch up.
Timepieces for the man in the street
Fashion watches (quartz) for the general public were introduced in the ’80s, but only became a widespread rage in the late ’90s. Luck ran out pretty soon for large watch manufacturers when people started moving time from their wrists to their pockets.
Statistics from 2011 showed that on average people told time exactly as often with their phone as with their watch (37%). That same study shows that 20% referred to clocks and that the remaining 6% used other means or just couldn’t be bothered with telling time at all.
After the success of internet-connected phones connected, a new generation of watches found their way to the market of consumer electronics: The smartwatch.
To this day smartwatches still grow in popularity, but not at the scale that they could potentially dethrone the smartphone as the number one time-telling device. The question remains though,
Does constantly knowing what time it is, help us manage it better?
Written by Sayoni Mahapatra Chatterji
Early Morning Memories 