Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A Brief History of Timekeeping

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

Our ability to measure time is one of the fundamental things which makes us human. We’ve gone from very crude and inexact measures of time to time measurements which are so accurate that it would take billions of years to lose a single second. This increased accuracy has allowed us to navigate the seas, space, and even get directions to a nearby store. Learn about the history of how we keep time on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our ability to measure time is one of the fundamental things which makes us human. We've gone from very crude and inexact measures of time to time measurements which are so accurate it would take billions of years to lose a single second. This increased accuracy has allowed us to navigate the seas, space, and even get directions to a nearby store. Learn about the history of how we keep time on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison.

Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspiruality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. This episode is sponsored by audible.com. If you're interested in how we keep time, the audiobooks. I would recommend is Longitude, the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time by Dava Sobel. She tells the story of John Harrison, who developed the first

highly accurate mechanical clocks which could be taken on ships to track position of longitude. Follow Harrison over several decades as he improved his clocks to win a 20,000 pound prize from the British Parliament. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to audible trial.com slash everything everywhere, or by clicking on the link in the show notes. Early humans didn't have the need for accurate time measurement, nor did they care. Their schedules followed the sun, and there was little which occurred during the day, which required accurate coordination. As agriculture developed and civilization arose, the need for some sort of basic time organization arose with it.

The first real system of keeping time was the sundial. The oldest node sundial dates back to 1500 BC and was found. in Egypt. Sundials were fine for what they were used for, but they had several obvious drawbacks. They were useless if the sun wasn't out, or at night. Candles were often used to keep time at night. So long as the candles were made consistently out of the same material and were the same shape, you could get approximate time values for how long it took the candle to burn. They solved many of the problems of sundials, but candles were consumed every time you use them. Candles also weren't cheap to produce, so it wasn't as if a candle was being used in every hundred.

home. Gravity was also used to create timepieces. The first such device was known as a Klepsreda in ancient Egypt, which was a water clock. It was a simple device which measured time by draining water. These have been found in most ancient civilizations. Babylon, Egypt, Persia, all used waterclocks, as did the ancient Chinese and Indians. The water clock was the precursor to the sandial or the hourglass, which most of you are still familiar with today. The hourglass used the same basic principles as a water clock, but with sand. Unlike a water clock, it didn't require constant refilling, you could just turn it over. It was also less subject to changes in time with temperature. Our glasses also had one major advantage over every other method of keeping time. They could be used

at sea. Sun dials, candles, and gravity clocks were pretty much the choices for several thousand years. While they might be timekeeping devices, none of them are really what we would consider a clock today. The creation of a true clock, with hands that could tell time, didn't come about until the invention of a device called an escapement. An escapement allows a gear to be moved periodically in discrete steps. This is literally what makes a clock tick. If you've ever seen the inner workings of a clock, you'll notice a back-and-forth movement which allows a gear to rotate in increments. That's an escapement. What escapements did was change timekeeping from something continuous like the burning of a candle, the flow of water,

or the movement of the sun, to something repetitive and oscillary. There's early evidence of escapement-type devices in Greece, used in conjunction with water clocks, and in the 8th century in China, where the water was replaced with mercury. The real breakthrough was with the verge escapement, or the crown-wheel escapement. These appeared in the 13th century, and it allowed the creation of totally mechanical clocks. They could take energy which came from gravity, like a pendulum or falling weight, and turn it into steady rotational motion, which could then move the hands of a clock. Cities in Europe began installing these clocks on towers so they could be seen by entire towns,

and they became an immense point of civic pride. Many of these older tower clocks are still running today with much of the original equipment. Burn Switzerland City Clock is called the Zygolata. I've actually been up in the clock tower twice, and I've been able to see the original gears which run the clock. It's really fascinating stuff. With the crown wheel escapement, clock started to show. more information and became more complicated. Adding information, such as the phases of the moon or the days of the week,

became known as complications, which is still what they're known as today, even on digital watches. These complications would also include mechanical chimes, and even automated events such as figures which would come out of hiding and run on a track, and short tunes which would be played on an organ. While these clock towers looked like modern clocks, and in every sense they were, they weren't very portable. You couldn't put a clock in your pocket, and you certainly couldn't use a gravity-powered clock on a ship, which was swaying back and forth. The next big innovation was the creation of clocks that were powered by springs. Springs could store the energy to run a clock inside the clock itself. With an escapement, the energy in the spring would be released in

increments, and it would only have to be wound periodically to put the energy back in. Springs began being used in the 15th century, but they really came into their own with the creation. of the first truly portable clocks. John Harrison is credited with the creation of the first portable clocks. He developed these clocks in order to win a prize of 20,000 pounds, or about $3 million in today's money, which was issued by the British Parliament to solve the problem of longitude. Sailors have long been able to determine their latitude by using a sexton and the pole star.

However, determining longitude proved to be extremely challenging. Harrison believed that if ships had an accurate clock which was set to the time in Greenwich, England, then by measuring when solar noon occurred wherever they might be, they could then determine the difference in time and calculate how far away they were. The trick was creating a clock that could work on a ship. Harrison set to work creating a series of five clocks over 40 years. Each clock improved on the one before it. Along the way, he had to solve numerous technical problems, and many of his solutions

became the foundations of modern clockmaking. His fifth clock proved to be accurate within one-third of one second per day. With these innovations, watches began to take off. The difference between a watch and a clock is how they're powered. Clocks technically are powered by gravity, whereas watches are powered by springs. Today, a clock is usually just a larger timekeeping device which sits on a wall or on a shelf, whereas a watch is portable. But the original distinction was between gravity and springs.

Harrison's fifth clock looked like a giant pocket watch. Over time, they shrunk so they could fit in a pocket. Switzerland became a huge center for watchmaking in the 19th century. The town of Le Chaud-Defans in Switzerland became the center of the watchmaking universe. Individual artisans began making watches, which was something they could do in the winter when they weren't running their farms. Eventually, an entire industry sprang up, and now it dominates the local economy. Today, most of the high-end luxury mechanical watch brands are still local.

located here. They have a great museum which shows the history of watchmaking and timekeeping. Wrist watches were first designed for women, starting with the very first one being given to Queen Elizabeth I. In the 19th century, they became the accepted way for women to use a watch, whereas men were expected to use a pocket watch. In the late 19th and early 20th century, wrist watches were adopted by the military so soldiers could easily check their time to coordinate maneuvers. The next big leap in timekeeping occurred with the creation of a electronic clocks. In 1927, Bell Labs created the first electronic quartz clock. Quartz is what's known as a piezoelectric material. That means if it is deformed, it can create a charge.

The opposite is also true. If an electrical charge is applied to it, it will bend. It is this property of quartz, which allows it to be used as a clock. A charge is applied to the quartz, which causes it to oscillate, and the oscillations are what allow us to keep time. Quartz clocks and watches became available to the public in the late 1960s, and they had two massive advantages over mechanical watches. First, they were cheap to produce, and second, they were an order of magnitude more accurate than mechanical clocks. The final advance in timekeeping was first theorized by Lord Calvin in the 19th century, but it wasn't practical until the later half of the 20th century. Atomic clocks. Atomic clocks work on the principle that atoms have a resonant

frequency. By counting the oscillations in the atom, we can keep time. Atomic clocks are insanely accurate. We have even redefined the base unit of time, the second, to atomic standards. The official definition of what a second is is now defined as the time that elapses between 9,192,000, 631,770 cycles of the radiation produced between the transition of two levels of the Seism 1-33-Adam. No, there will not be a test at the end of the episode. The Keeper of Time in the United States is the National Institute for Standards and Technology. They keep the official clock on which everything is based.

They run a radio station at call sign WWV, which does nothing but give the time. Here is a very brief taste of what you can expect to hear on their station. That is some rivening content. The NIST also runs a website called Time.gov. where you can check the accuracy of the time on your computer as well. By far, the most important use of atomic time today is with GPS satellites. Every GPS satellite has an atomic clock on board. Time is actually how GPS works, but I'll leave the details of that for another episode.

If GPS clocks were off by more than one millionth of a second, the accuracy of GPS would be off by more than half a mile. GPS clocks, due to their speed orbiting the Earth, also have to compensate for time dilation due to relativity. If they didn't make this compensation, the entire system would fail within hours. While GPS is mostly used for determining location, its use as a universal clock for the whole Earth might actually be more valuable. It allows for everyone in the planet to be on the same page with respect to time.

It allows stock trades to function properly online. Cell towers all have GPS receivers, not to determine their location, but to determine the time. Indirectly, the time on your smartphone was determined by an atomic clock. Atomic clocks keep getting better and setting new records for accuracy. The current champion is a clock at the NIST, which uses aluminum atoms. As of August 2019, they claim the clock would only lose one second every 33 billion years, which is pretty good, considering that the universe is only thought to be 13.7 billion years old. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAlla.

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