How We First Started To Tell The Time? - By: Allan Michael Taylor

The value of time is widespread and eternal. The inevitability to be attentive of the daily timing was recognized even to primitive men. Even if they did not know anything about time, but had devised their agendas according to days and nights.

Unlike following some night animals, they copied the general routine of other animals that used day as the working time and night as the resting time. Furthermore, human beings also adopted the more 'humane' approach where they started to watch some schedule or timetable in their daily lives.

This observance of timetable eventually gives rise to a need to keep count of the time and date. That was the time when these relatives of current human beings started keeping track of time. They started using the movement of the sun and the moon and studying the spot of the stars to determine the time. People started observing the shadows of the sun and calculated the time as per the position of the shadow.

This observable fact eventually gave way to sundial clock. This is one of the most primitive recorded clocks in human history. A sundial clock was simply an object (iron or wooden rod) placed in sun with some markings that pointed to the time. People used to compute the time as per the direction and size of the shadow cast by this rod.

This continued for numerous centuries along with the calculation of time looking at the physical indicators of the day or night. Nonetheless, people felt the need for a more correct time keeping device at that time. Both sundial and physical indicators to calculate time were unproductive and almost inaccurate. They needed some more superior methods to calculate time.

This need eventually gave rise to the invention of hourglass. Hourglass was a simple device that used two small glass chambers connected with each other and used sand as the time measuring device. Finely crushed sand used to come down from the top glass chamber to the bottom one. This usually took an hour. Once the bottom chamber was full, it was turned upside down and time counting started again through the falling of sand.

People soon got bored of the hourglass even. They termed it as an old device that required a lot of manual work in turning it upside down repeatedly. They sought an mechanical system to tell time. The search for a ideal medium eventually led them to modern day clocks. Most primitive versions of clocks were much superior and heavier than current day ones.

They used a intricate system of mechanics, pendulums and oscillators to measure time. The bigger size slowly started decreasing with time. Watches became the order of the day and old mechanical clocks gave way to current digital clocks. Now you can even measure correct milliseconds and nanoseconds by using an atomic clock. The specific time keeping is no more known a difficult task and all this was made likely due to inquiring nature of humans.

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