HISTORY36 - Measuring Time
I was born on March 29, 1940 at 5:35 am. I know that because of the existence of an accurate calendar that depicted the year, month, and day of my arrival, and a clock that displayed the early morning hour and minutes past the hour. (And because someone, other than me, wrote it down on my birth certificate.) So where did accurate calendars and timekeeping devices come from? That is the subject of this article. My principal resources were Britanica.com, “Calendar Chronology,” and ScientificAmerican.com, “A Chronology of Timekeeping,” along with numerous other online sources. Prehistoric Peoples The only measures of time available to primitive peoples were the solar day (the space between successive sunrises) and the lunar month (the space between two successive new moons). So, they reckoned the passage of time, counting suns, or days, and moons, or months. They counted “years” broadly, noting when leaves began sprouting on a particular tree or ...