# Historical Time Keeping

Horologium Sapientiae, by Heinrich Seuse (c. 1450)

# Contents

This workshop enumerates methods of improving time-keeping practices.
For more information about time zones, refer to the partner workshop Time Zone Administration

• Overview
• Ancient Time Keeping
  • Antiquity
  • Middle Ages
  • Age of Exploration
• Early Time Zones
• Modern Time Zones
  • International Demarcation
  • Daylight Savings Time
  • Information Age

# Overview

To maintain accurate time zones requires precise methods of time keeping. This workshop explores the evolution of methods of time keeping from Antiquity to the the modern age, concluding roughly upon the outbreak of the First World War.

# Ancient Time Keeping

Early time keeping methods were localized. Very few municipal standardization methods emerged until the Late Middle Ages (1250-1500).

# Antiquity

• 1500 BCE: Oldest extant continuous time-keeping device found in the Valley of the Kings.²

  • Nocturnal time keeping impossible.
  • Discrete measurement imprecise.
  • Changing location changes measurement.

  

• 200 BCE: Water clocks used for discrete measurements of time during the Han dynasty.³

  • Nocturnal time keeping introduced.
  • Tedious to maintain.

  

The Antikythera mechanism, discovered in 1902 amidst wreckage off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. Phenomenon tracked by the device were observed and studied by Greek astronomer Hipparchus in the second century BCE, as such, he is thought to have been involved in its creation and design.

# Middle Ages

• Three distinct periods, none of which are particularly good for time-keeping advancements:

  • Early Middle Ages: 400 - 999 CE
  • High Middle Ages: 1000 - 1249 CE
  • Late Middle Ages: 1250 - 1500 CE

• 300 - 1200 CE: The development of continuous escapement mechanisms.⁴ The sliding rope paradox remains unsolved until the invention of calculus in the 17th century.

  Century	Number of Major Battles	Year-on-Year Change	Annual Average*	Percent Change
  5th✝	7	+0%	7	+0%
  6th	14	+100%	11	+57%
  7th^	17	+21%	13	+18%
  8th	5	-70%	11	-15%
  9th**	36	+720%	16	+45%
  10th	15	-58%	16	+0%
  11th	20	+33%	16	+0%

Source: Battlefield Trust, 2018^5
* Values rounded to nearest whole integer.
^✝ Collapse of the Roman Empire.
^{^} Foundation of Islam.
^** Invasion of the Great Heathen Army.

• 1237: The development of verge-and-foilet escapement improves the accuracy of timekeeping.⁶

  • Time-keeping devices become larger and more public.
  • Early standardization begins.

• 1287: The Dubstable Priory clock, believed to be the first mechanical clock in the world is erected in Bedfordshire, England.⁷

  

• 1347-1351: Peak of the Black Death.

  

  Danse Macabre by Michael Wolgemut (1493)

• c.1250-1500: Major wars of the Late Middle Ages.

  • Mongol Invasion of Kievan Rus' (1237-1242)
  • Wars of Scottish Independence (1296-1357)
  • Hundred Years' War (1337-1453)
  • War of the Roses (1455-1487)
  • Burgundian Wars (1474-1477)
  • Muscovite-Lithuanian Wars (1492-1537)
  • Rapid Ottoman expansion.

# Age of Exploration

Map of the New World, Sebastian Münster, 1540

• 1507: Amerigo Vespucci demonstrates that what will come to be known as the Americas are not connected to Asia, but represent a "fourth area" of the world.⁸

• 1657: The first pendulum clock is patented on 16 June by Christiaan Huygens in the Spanish Netherlands;⁹ this method will remain the most accurate way of keeping time until the 1930s.¹⁰

  • Entire process is uniform.
  • Maintenance is trivial.
  • Precise time-keeping technology paves the road for Enlightenment thinkers to perform repeatable scientific experimentation.

  

• 1675: Greenwich Mean Time established to aid mariners in the calculation of longitude.¹¹

• 1698: Thomas Savery invents the steam engine.¹²

• 1715: The death of Louis XIV marks the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment.

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# Early Time Zones

The Age of Enlightenment (1715-1799) fostered growth in every area of human life; the Romantic period (1800-1850) brought the world closer together through globalization.

# Navigational Necessity

• The advent of long-distance water-based travel necessitated the use of celestial phenomenon for navigational purposes.
• 1731: Longitude derived using tools of the Age of Exploration such as the sextant.¹³

# Expansion and Standardization

• The locomotive is invented in 1804 by Richard Trevithick.¹⁴

• The emergence of railroad networks created the need for coordinated time across vast distances relative to multiple positions.

  

• 1847: Using telegraph technology, time signals are transmitted great distances across Great Britain (~1,000 km) to coordinate railroad activities and thus became known as Railway time.¹⁵

• New Zealand Mean Time (GMT +11:30): The first recognized time zone established in 1868.¹⁶

• Other railroad systems were far less compact, and therefore able to function using far sloppier time keeping methods.

  • Local standardization in the Russian Empire occurred in 1880 with the introduction of Moscow Mean Time which was unaffiliated with GMT.¹⁷
  • North American standardization occurred in 1883, with major railroad stations used as delimiting points.¹⁸
  • By 1884, 85% of American cities used GMT standardized time.
    • Detroit: Operated on non-standard local time until 1900, then Central Standard Time, local mean time, and Eastern Standard Time before a May 1915 ordinance settled on EST and was ratified by popular vote in August 1916.
  • The Soviet Union standardized Moscow Time to GMT +2:00 in 1919, as well as other Russian time zones, and implemented the use of the Gregorian calendar.

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# Modern Time Zones

# International Demarcation

• First proposed in 1858 by Italian mathematician Quirico Filopanti.
• Scottish-Canadian Sandford Fleming successfully proposed the creation of a "universal time," upon which all other time zones would eventually be based in 1879.²⁰
• By 1900, nearly every country had approximately standardized its own time, but international cooperation was still rare.
• Between 1900-1929 all major countries standardized their own time to a derivation of GMT.
• 1956: Nepal is the last country to standardize its time to GMT.²¹

# Daylight Savings Time

Daylight savings time is a one-hour correction applied to local time during summer months to account for discrepancies between apparent solar time and mean solar time.

• First proposed in 1895 by New Zealand entomologist George Hudson.²²
• 1908: Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada is the first municipality to implement daylight savings time. Several other Northern Canadian municipalities followed suit.²³
• 1916: Implemented for the first time on a national level by the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.²⁴

  • Justification for this move emphasized the electrical energy which could be diverted to the war effort (First World War: 28 July 1914 - 11 November 1918).

    

  • Britain and most of western Europe matched the change. Russia implemented the change in 1917. The United States implemented the change in 1918.

  • The British Empire, its dominions, and the United States maintained the practice after the war but it was abandoned by other countries during the interwar period.

• Daylight savings time reintroduced at the global level during World War II.²⁵

  • British time is pushed ahead two hours instead of the usual one, called "Double Summer Time".

  • America creates "War Time," or permanent daylight savings time.

    

  • Vichy France enforces Double Summer Time during its alliance with the Axis.

  • 1945: The Soviet sector in Berlin, as well as the German Democratic Republic as a whole, practice Double Summer Time to align local time with Moscow.

# Information Age

• 1921: Crystal oscillation technology is independently discovered and experimented upon in various locations; Alexander Nicholson of Bell Telephone Laboratories is generally credited with the invention.²⁶

• 1936: Alan Turing proposes the modern computer in his paper On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.

• 1948: "Manchester Baby" runs its first program 21 June.²⁷

  

• During the 1970s energy crisis, daylight savings time is adopted by most affected nations to conserve fuel reserves.²⁶

• time_t format: number of seconds elapsed since Thursday, January 1, 1970.²⁸

• GMT renamed Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), most Unix-like operating systems determine time_t from UTC time by default.

• 1988: International Organization for Standardization creates ISO 8601 format to establish a standard expression of time and date.

• The second: International System of Units standard unit for time.

  • "The duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom," in an environment whose temperature is not 0 K (-273.15°C).²⁹

• The atomic clock: measurement of a finite discontinuous event (quantum leap) serves as the basis of time.

The Fate of Daylight Savings Time
Russian Federation ceases the practice of Daylight Savings Time in 2010.³⁰
European Union plans to eliminate daylight savings time in the coming years.³¹
Most nations still observing daylight savings time are former British colonies or territories.³²

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