Christina here. Before the pandemic, I think it’s fair to say that most of us were very aware of time and it was very important to us – even ruled our lives. We were setting alarms to get up in the morning, checking train or bus schedules to get to work by a certain time, having our lunch at a precise time, plus there were appointments to keep and tv programmes to watch. Being late was something we tried to avoid and we probably glanced at our watch (or the time display on our mobile) regularly, sometimes obsessively, during the day. My days weren’t quite so strictly scheduled as I’m self-employed and work from home, but when I still had my dogs (now sadly deceased), their stomachs had time-keeping down to a fine art. They structured my time and they would never have let me get away with not taking them for a walk at the same hour every day. In other words, I lived by the clock.
However, after nearly a year in lockdown, I’m finding that the concept of time is becoming very fluid. It’s almost as though we’re living in a dream, where everything is unreal or even surreal. There are no appointments, no specific times to keep, no rush or urgency about anything. The days simply float into one another seamlessly, with nothing to distinguish them from one another. Mostly I have no idea what day or date it is, and I find I don’t care because it doesn’t matter. The only day that registers even vaguely is Sunday, and that is only because I have a weekly chat scheduled then with two friends. And Sunday seems to come around approximately every second day!
This has made me wonder how our ancestors felt about time – was it important to them? Presumably, in the past, people weren’t ruled by the clock to the extent we are/were in this century. For one thing, poor people wouldn’t have owned a watch or any sort of timepiece, and presumably their chores had to be finished each day, no matter what time it was. Their bodies must have been used to certain routines, otherwise how would they have been able to wake up in time to do the milking each morning, for example? I’m guessing they had very well-developed internal body clocks.
For someone like me, who is a night owl, I would have been a disaster as a dairy maid or factory worker who had to start at the crack of dawn. When I’m asleep, nothing wakes me. Most of us are either owls or larks and I suppose the morning people of the past must have woken those who were more inclined to sleep late. Or perhaps they were eventually “re-programmed” somehow? Not sure I could be.
So who first started worrying about time? I went to look this up and fell down a research rabbit hole – here’s a potted history:-
Obviously, time was originally divided up into years, months, weeks and days using the sun and moon to figure out patterns. Even ancient civilisations could easily do this. Apparently the ancient Egyptians were the first to have some kind of sundials and, at some point, they started to split the day into equal parts. At that time, counting wasn’t based on the decimal system that we have. Instead they used the number 12 (duodecimal system), and this was probably either because that is the number of lunar cycles in a year or the number of joints we have on our hands. (Weirdly, they ignored the thumb and there are three joints in each of the other four fingers.)
They then also split the nights into 12 parts using certain stars for guidance, and that was the beginning of our current system. The Egyptians had something called a clepsydra, a water clock that uses a flow of water to measure time. With this they were able to tell how much time had passed even when it was dark. One of these has been found and dated to as early as 1400BC – ingenious! (The Chinese probably used something similar around the same time).
Other ancient ways of measuring time are candle clocks (a candle with markings on it to indicate that a certain period of time has passed when it burns down) and the hourglass (probably invented after the clepsydra though).
It was the Greeks who thought up the concept of fixed length hours – their astronomers needed a better system for their calculations. A man called Hipparchus proposed that the day should be divided into 24 equinoctial hours, ie. based on the 12 hours each of daylight and darkness that could be measured on equinox days. But most normal people didn’t adopt this system and varied the hours according to season. Hours that were fixed at the same length didn’t really become the norm until mechanical clocks were invented in the 14th century.
The techniques that Hipparchus and others used had actually first been developed by the Babylonians, so were old already then. The Babylonians in turn had learned (or inherited the knowledge) from the Sumerians, who invented them around 2000 BC. They all used the duodecimal system too.
The Romans had both sun dials and water clocks, which were useful on days when there was no sun as well as during the night. Their understanding of time was a bit different to ours though and each day and night was divided into twelve hours (or parts) but these were not the same throughout the year. It varied from month to month and started at dawn, so that for example during winter, one hour could be 45 minutes long by our reckoning, while in the summer it could be as long as one and a half hour. Midnight was always the sixth hour of the night, and midday was easy to see obviously. They would refer to the time as the “first hour” – so just after the sun rose – the “second hour” and so on, up to the “twelfth hour” which was the one before sunset.
The Vikings didn’t count hours as far as I’ve been able to learn, and dawn, dusk and midday were probably the only times that registered with them. In Scandinavia in winter daylight hours can be as few as four, whereas in summer the light continues through the night, so they would have had to adapt to that. I suppose if you’re spending most of your time inside a dim, smoky hall lit by oil lamps and a hearth, time is fairly immaterial.
As I mentioned, mechanical clocks were invented in Europe around the beginning of the 14th century. They had something called a verge escapement mechanism (which works by moving something at regular intervals), and that stayed in use until the pendulum clock (using a swinging weight) was invented in 1656 by a Dutch scientist called Christiaan Huygens.
The so called mainspring – a sort of metal ribbon that is twisted into a spiral that unwinds – which was invented in the early 15th century, eventually developed into use for pocket watches. Huygens refined it into a spiral balance spring so that pocket watches became a lot more accurate. Minutes weren’t used until the end of the 16th century and seconds came much later. There was really no need for them at that time.
Watch and clockmakers were highly skilled and created some beautiful timepieces. My favourites are the silver and gold fob watches, especially Victorian ones. During the 20th century, pendulum clocks were replaced by quartz oscillators, and later the way of measuring time changed again when atomic clocks were invented. It’s amazing how accurately we can now measure it, down to tiny units like nano-seconds. (I watch a lot of motor racing with my husband and the margins when someone wins can be infinitesimal!)
When (if) the pandemic is over, will we all be more chilled about time or will we start rushing around again being ruled by small time-keeping devices? It will be interesting to see.
Has the pandemic affected the way you view time? And are you a night owl or a lark?