I was asking myself how people measured time before mechanical clocks, and I completely forgot about hourglasses.
I wonder if the development of mechanics was hindered by the lack of standardized time-keeping. I've read that Galileo used his own pulse to measure pendular motion, and I find that highly impractical.
If you're interested in this, the absolutely wonderful book "The Discoverers" by Daniel Boorstin goes into a lot of detail on how humankind discovered time and developed methods to keep time.
The part of the article I was hoping to emphasize with the original title (IIRC it was Tamper-resistant time-keeping) was this:
the sandglass was the primary means of fair timekeeping. The sand glass was visible to all in a room, and it could only be dramatically and obviously “reset”, it couldn’t be fudged like a mechanical clock.
By virtue of being highly visible and slow to reset thus difficult to sabotage made it an ideal tool not just for time-keeping in general, but dedicating time to activities where fairness and equality were important. The simplicity of the mechanism hides the sophistication of its action - being an auditable accounting system.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 36.3 ms ] threadI wonder if the development of mechanics was hindered by the lack of standardized time-keeping. I've read that Galileo used his own pulse to measure pendular motion, and I find that highly impractical.
the sandglass was the primary means of fair timekeeping. The sand glass was visible to all in a room, and it could only be dramatically and obviously “reset”, it couldn’t be fudged like a mechanical clock.
By virtue of being highly visible and slow to reset thus difficult to sabotage made it an ideal tool not just for time-keeping in general, but dedicating time to activities where fairness and equality were important. The simplicity of the mechanism hides the sophistication of its action - being an auditable accounting system.