How was time measured in olden days

Humankind's efforts to tell time have helped drive the evolution of our technology and science throughout history. The need to gauge the divisions of the day and night led the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans to create sundials, water clocks and other early chronometric tools. Western Europeans adopted these technologies, but by the 13th century, demand for a dependable timekeeping instrument led medieval artisans to invent the mechanical clock. Although this new device satisfied the requirements of monastic and urban communities, it was too inaccurate and unreliable for scientific application until the pendulum was employed to govern its operation. The precision timekeepers that were subsequently developed resolved the critical problem of finding a ship's position at sea and went on to play key roles in the industrial revolution and the advance of Western civilization. Today highly accurate timekeeping instruments set the beat for most of our electronic devices. Nearly all computers, for example, contain a quartz-crystal clock to regulate their operation. Moreover, not only do time signals beamed down from Global Positioning System satellites calibrate the functions of precision navigation equipment, they do so as well for cellular telephones, instant stock-trading systems and nationwide power-distribution grids. So integral have these time-based technologies become to our day-to-day lives that we recognize our dependency on them only when they fail to work. Reckoning...

The ancient Greeks measured time with the clepsydra, or “water thief,” at the Amphiareion of Oropos. Credit: Nefasdicere at English Wikipedia J. M. Harrington, personal digital image/CC BY 2.5 The ancient Greeks measured time in part because human beings have felt the need to track the passage of their hours and days since time immemorial, prompted certainly by the need to plant things at the appropriate time, on the appropriate day at just the right time of year. Perhaps there has just always been in us the need to chronicle our days and record their passage for their own sake. Some historians believe that the first timekeeping devices were created through a desire to chart our lives using the principles of astrology. Whatever first prompted us to try to record time, doing so has been a drive in human beings since the Neolithic era, according to a new book by physicist Chad Orzel called “A Brief History of Timekeeping,” published by BenBella Books in 2022. Orzel traces the evolution of recording time, from the water clocks that showed how long it took water to flow out of a container to elegant sand-filled hourglasses to the first mechanical and pendulum-driven clocks. As can be appreciated by anyone, the attempt to conquer time by being able to quantify it appears to be a universal need. Water clocks, along with sundials, are most likely the oldest time-measuring instruments, with the only exceptions being the tally stick, which counts days. Given their extraordinary ant...

Table of Contents • • • • • • • • How did they measure distance in ancient times? In ancient times, the body ruled when it came to measuring. The length of a foot, the width of a finger, and the distance of a step were all accepted measurements. Inch: At first an inch was the width of a man’s thumb. Span: A span was the length of the hand stretched out, about 9 inches. How speed is measured in ancient times? Ancient mariners used to gauge how fast their ship was moving by throwing a piece of wood or other floatable object over the vessel’s bow then counting the amount of time that elapsed before its stern passed the object. By the late 16th century, sailors had begun using a chip log to measure speed. How did ancient people measure height? One way to measure the height of an object was by climbing to its top and dropping a rope to the bottom (tying its end to a rock) and then measuring the rope’s length. This, however, was difficult and sometimes dangerous, and also doesn’t always work (like in the case of a pyramid). When did humans start measuring time? The measurement of time began with the invention of sundials in ancient Egypt some time prior to 1500 B.C. However, the time the Egyptians measured was not the same as the time today’s clocks measure. For the Egyptians, and indeed for a further three millennia, the basic unit of time was the period of daylight. What are the two method of measuring time? Time can be measured using a simple pendulum, stopwatch, atomic clock...

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In olden days time was measured by Sundial Ancient civilizations such as the Sumerians did have this knowledge, but when the culture died, knowledge was lost along with many other aspects of the civilization unfortunately. One thing that is known is this. It was the ancient Egyptians who did come up with a form of system to divide the day up into parts. These parts were a whole lot like hours in description. The Egyptians constructed obelisks, which were four-sided and well tapered monuments, and they were geographically located in certain places. These obelisks were believed to have been constructed around 3500 BC and a shadow would be cast by the obelisk as the sun made it’s way across the sky. This obelisk would be marked out in certain sections to see the two halves of the day. There was another more advanced shadow clock or sundial in use by the ancient Egyptians around 1500 BC. This shadow clock or sundial permitted one to measure the passage of hours within a day. Another very early form of clock to tell the time was the water clock. The water clock was used by the ancient Greeks. It is considered to be one of the earliest forms of timekeeping devices that didn’t take use the observance of the celestial bodies to help calculate the passage of time. It is believed that the ancient Greeks started using these early timekeeping devices around 325 BC. These clocks were mainly used to determine the hours of nighttime, but they may also have been used for daylight hours as...

Under the leadership of the Father of Lights, the Creator's Calendar team have made a 180 degree paradigm shift from one new moon to another. We now recognize only the full moon as the new moon. This has been a pilgrimage journey in truth and humility to arrive at this interchange. Click Recent Posts • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Five Historic Methods of Time-Measuring Most of us today, from all nations of the earth and within the confines of our busy lives, are unaware that there has ever been more than one way of measuring time. Most often we assume that years, months, weeks, and days have always been measured as we were taught by our parents and teachers. Even the time references in Scripture we have believed to be accurately measured according to the same Roman Gregorian calendar so popular today. Add to this that th e common premise that Saturday must be the true seventh-day Sabbath of the Scriptures because the modern Yahudim (Jews) worship on that day, is an erroneous assumption. But, in light of the fact that the Yahudim themselves acknowledge that their modern calendar is not the s...

Our planet is hurtling around the Sun at about To complete one orbit, the Earth has to travel almost a billion kilometres, and the time this takes is what we call a year. However, we only notice that there is such a thing as a year because the axis of the Earth’s rotation is tilted compared to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. This tilt causes the changing lengths of the day and night, and hence, the seasons. For half the year, the northern hemisphere is tilted closer to the Sun, leading to longer days, more sunlight and warmer weather, while the opposite is true in the southern hemisphere. For the other half of the year the situation is reversed. But if you didn’t already know there are 365 sunrises in a year, how could you determine when a full year had passed? The summer solstice is the point in the year when the places where the sun rises and sets are at their furthest points apart on the horizon. It then reverses until—roughly six lunar cycles later in mid-winter—the sunrise and sunset occur closest together. And then they grow further apart again. By observing the direction of the sunrise and sunset from a fixed point—for example, by placing a series of stakes in the ground to mark their positions over the course of the year—you’d gradually build up a partial circle of markers tracking the Sun’s progress across the horizon. We can see this at many of the ancient stone and earth circles built by our ancestors across the globe. So we see how the Sun has defined ou...