Thread for anything related to historical methods of measuring/keeping time and how it affected daily life.
Clok
If, instead of BC/AD, you could change the organization of years, how would you change it? Ditto, but for the structure of calendars (e.g gregorian, lunar, mayan etc.)?
Nail candle
Aside from it's grandness, interest and cataloging of the stars were in part due to their association with the seasons and as such were associated with time (hence horoscopes and all other divining). Certain festivals thus revolved around the state of the stars in relation to the seasons which essentially don't exist anymore due to artifical lighting and more generally decline in culture.
>>18028597There's nothing wrong with BC/AD, it doesn't seem worth the effort to restructure the whole organization just to get rid of the association with Christ. BCE is a cringe solution, it's still the same timekeeping and it even has "BC" in the fucking name so the acronym association is still there. I would assume that after hundreds of years of refinement our current system is pretty good (twelve lunar months, year based on one solar orbit), yeah there's some leap year bullshit required to make it work but it's not like its an awful, confusing or unworkable system. Maybe change it so the first 11 months are also uniformly 30 days long and just put all the excess days in December, but that's just changing shit for the sake of changing shit.
>>18028775Were those just used to by rich people or for certain occasions? I don't know how expensive wax was but I would assume that spending 365 candles a year would be extremely wasteful for the average person when they would probably just have a natural circadian rhythm, a rooster, church bell, people working night jobs or other means of waking people.
>>18028597>instead of BC/ADI don't think we should have such a distinction in the first place. Time is just a relation between two objects/events and it would make sense to develop a system for common use that treats it like that. But if we must use an epoch then I would use the one from the Hijri calendar because BC/AD doesn't actually refer to when Jesus was born so it is not honoring anything but Christian tradition. If it was proven however that he was born at that time, then I would have no real problem with it at all. However if you want something more universal I think it's wise to just use the unix epoch since most data is stored on computers these days and most web server/db software is written with that in mind. I also don't like the idea of time keeping relying on the sun's availability, we don't even really do it with hours so why should we do it with years? The reason being that different places in the world experience seasons and daylight hours differently. It's why we have the arbitrary bullshit we call time zones but somehow an equivalent doesn't exist for tweaking the calendar. People want 11 AM to refer to daylight almost everywhere in the globe but not January to refer to winter months exclusively? Either do it for months too or just don't do it at all. Another thing is we should use the SI definition of the second instead of 1⁄86400 Earth's rotation because it would get rid of the leap second bullshit and again it would be more universal. All this being said I hate change for the sake of change, the systems currently in use are very much workable even if not ideal. Plus they have historical basis, imagine reading an older book and you have to perform non-trivial calculations just to understand when a specific event takes place just for the sake of autistic perfection. Nobody would even want to adopt such a standard
>>18029609Aside from what you stated (were waterclocks lost technology?), I highly doubt a nail dropping such a distance reliably waking someone, but the mechanism would've functioned maybe if you were working in the study during night and wanted to simply track the passage for an hour or so. Might be fake, and if it wasn't I doubt it was in wide use. Given ifunny but otherwise info pic, the inclination is that it's a trick of sorts, so rather than just seeing reactions I wonder if there's something more to it. Maybe if you literally copied the left pic, then the nail dropping would cause the candle to tip over and burn your house down while asleep?
>>18029711I'm not sure how much of it was lost technology versus there just not being any need for it. Time zones were not a necessity until trains were invented, and the vast majority of people followed the same routines and had the same circadian rhythm, and if you lived during that era then you would probably be good at using the sun to tell what time it is. If you were rich enough to have a private study then you might even own a mechanical clock, at least from the 15th/16th century and onward.
>>18028592Rooster
John Harrison's H1 Marine Chronometer is one of the most underrated inventions in history in my opinion. Sure it's the progenitor of the first pocket watches and mechanical wrist watches, but I would also argue it gave the British Royal navy a distinct advantage when it came to navigation over their Spanish rivals and ultimately allowed them to best them. It's also why the Prime Meridian is in Greenwich
>>18028597Well if we are to have a starting point similar to bc/ad, I think the most obvious thing to centre it around that isn't vague on where to begin is the earliest form of writing that eventually saw widespread use (which to my awareness is Sumerian). Since dates/events are logged primarily in the written record, and because precise history (where specefic dates centuries in the past are relevant) consequently starts with it, it makes sense for our era to begin when what enabled that long-term logging to occur was invented. It's also stable in the sense that it's doubtful any earlier writing system which has legacy relevant to the modern will come forth. For instance, even if resting beneath the ice caps of the world are preserved bark strippings with (proto)writing found on it, being pre ice age it's essentially from another era. While they would likely be from a group that holds some genetic legacy their actions would've been of little consequence to the cradles of civilization that led to the present, and so tying the year to our present records of writing also coincides with the birth of what ultimately led to the modern era. Similarly, compare this to other elements of archaeology such as tools or buildings where older stuff is occasionally found that would disrupt the legitimacy of it. This date system would make this year 5425 I think.That said, along with whatever you use on a larger scale, I thought what the asians did was interesting even if tied to an arbitrary reference point (current ruler); which was splitting things into eras. Of course in this circumstance the length of an era was irregular and without knowing the orders of leaders there was no ability to discern chronology unless acquainted, so it's not as ideal for numerating the a precise date relative to another. But the idea of having a smaller region of time, like months but for years, based off something more tangible I thought was interesting.
>>18030775Any other animals used for time?
>>18031846Spanish women give me blowjobs at exactly 7:00 AM every day. Does that count?
>>18028592There was an entertaining film called Longitude about the problems of keeping time at sea in the 1700's.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--b0eaKGWwE
>>18028592Hourglass
>>18028592langoliers
