Time is a very simple and extremely complex concept. This word contains the answer to the question: “What time is it?” And the philosophical abyss. The best minds of mankind reflected on time, having written dozens of works. Time has been feeding philosophers since the days of Socrates and Plato.
The common people realized the importance of time without any philosophies. Dozens of proverbs and sayings about time prove this. Some of them hit, as they say, not in the eyebrow, but in the eye. Their diversity is striking - from “Every vegetable has its own time” to the almost repeating words of Solomon “Everything for the time being”. Recall that Solomon's ring was engraved with the phrases “Everything will pass” and “This will also pass,” which are considered a storehouse of wisdom.
At the same time, “time” is a very practical concept. People learned to determine the exact location of ships only by learning how to accurately determine the time. Calendars arose because it was necessary to calculate the dates of field work. They began to synchronize time with the development of technology, primarily transport. Gradually, time units appeared, accurate clocks, no less accurate calendars, and even people who did business on time appeared.
1. A year (one revolution of the Earth around the Sun) and a day (one revolution of the Earth around its axis) are (with great reservations) objective units of time. Months, weeks, hours, minutes and seconds are subjective units (as agreed). A day could well have any number of hours, as well as an hour of minutes, and minutes of seconds. The modern, very inconvenient time reckoning system is the legacy of Ancient Babylon, which used the 60-ary number system, and Ancient Egypt, with its 12-ary system.
2. Day is a variable value. In January, February, July and August, they are shorter than the average, in May, October and November, they are longer. This difference is thousandths of a second and is interesting only to astronomers. In general, the day is getting longer. Over 200 years, their duration has increased by 0.0028 seconds. It will take 250 million years for a day to become 25 hours.
3. The first lunar calendar appears to have appeared in Babylon. It was in the II millennium BC. From the point of view of accuracy, he was very rough - the year was divided into 12 months of 29 - 30 days. Thus, 12 days remained “unallocated” each year. The priests, at their discretion, added a month every three years out of eight. Cumbersome, imprecise - but it worked. After all, the calendar was needed in order to learn about new moons, river floods, the onset of a new season, and so on, and the Babylonian calendar coped with these tasks quite well. With such a system, only a third of a day a year was “lost”.
4. In ancient times, the day was divided, as we do now, into 24 hours. At the same time, 12 hours were allocated for the day, and 12 for the night. Accordingly, with the change of seasons, the duration of the “night” and “daytime hours” changed. In winter, the “night” hours lasted longer, in summer it was the turn of the “day” hours.
5. "Creation of the world", from which the ancient calendars were reporting, was a case, according to the compilers, a recent one - the world was created between 3483 and 6984. By planetary standards, this is, of course, an instant. In this respect, Indians have surpassed everyone. In their chronology there is such a concept as “eon” - a period of 4 billion 320 million years, during which life on Earth originates and dies. Moreover, there can be an infinite number of eons.
6. The current calendar that we use is called "Gregorian" in honor of Pope Gregory XIII, who approved in 1582 the draft calendar developed by Luigi Lilio. The Gregorian calendar is quite accurate. Its discrepancy with the equinoxes will be only a day in 3,280 years.
7. The beginning of the count of years in all existing calendars has always been some kind of important event. The ancient Arabs (even before the adoption of Islam) considered the “year of the elephant” to be such an event - that year the Yemenis attacked Mecca, and their troops included war elephants. The binding of the calendar to the birth of Christ was made in 524 AD by the monk Dionysius the Small in Rome. For Muslims, the years are counted from the moment when Muhammad fled to Medina. Caliph Omar in 634 decided that this happened in 622.
8. A traveler making a round-the-world trip, moving to the east, will be “ahead” of the calendar at the point of departure and arrival by one day. This is widely known from the actual history of the expedition of Fernand Magellan and the fictional, but no less interesting story by Jules Verne "Around the World in 80 Days". Less obvious is the fact that the savings (or loss if you move to the east) of the day does not depend on the speed of travel. Magellan's team sailed the seas for three years, and Phileas Fogg spent less than three months on the road, but they saved one day.
9. In the Pacific Ocean, the Date Line passes approximately along the 180th meridian. When crossing it in the direction to the west, the captains of ships and ships record two identical dates in a row in the logbook. Crossing the line eastward skips one day in the logbook.
10. A sundial is far from being such a simple type of clock as it seems. Already in ancient times, complex structures were developed that showed the time quite accurately. Moreover, the craftsmen made such clocks that struck the clock, and even initiated a cannon shot at a certain hour. For this, entire systems of magnifying glasses and mirrors were created. The famous Ulugbek, striving for the accuracy of the clock, built it 50 meters high. The sundial was built in the 17th century as a clock, and not as a decoration for parks.
11. The water clock in China was used as early as the III millennium BC. e. They also found the optimal shape of a vessel for a water clock at that time - a truncated cone with a ratio of height to diameter of the base 3: 1. Modern calculations show that the ratio should be 9: 2.
12. Indian civilization and in the case of the water clock went its own way. If in other countries the time was measured either by the descending water in the vessel, or by its addition to the vessel, then in India a water clock in the form of a boat with a hole in the bottom was popular, which gradually sank. To "wind" such a clock, it was enough to raise the boat and pour water out of it.
13. Despite the fact that the hourglass appeared later than the solar one (glass is a complex material), in terms of the accuracy of measuring time, they could not catch up with their older counterparts - too much depended on the uniformity of the sand and the cleanliness of the glass surface inside the flask. Nevertheless, the hourglass craftsmen had their own achievements. For example, there were systems of several hourglasses that could count down long periods of time.
14. Mechanical clocks are said to have been invented in the 8th century AD. in China, but judging by the description, they lacked the key component of a mechanical clock - a pendulum. The mechanism was powered by water. Oddly enough, but the time, place and name of the creator of the first mechanical watches in Europe are unknown. Since the 13th century, clocks have been massively installed in large cities. Initially, the tall clock towers were not required at all to tell the time from afar. The mechanisms were so bulky that they fit only in multi-storey towers. For example, in the Kremlin's Spasskaya Tower, the clockwork takes up as much space as 35 bells beating the chimes - an entire floor. Another floor is reserved for the shafts that rotate the dials.
15. The minute hand appeared on the clock in the middle of the 16th century, the second about 200 years later. This lag is not at all connected with the inability of the watchmakers. There was simply no need to count down less time intervals than an hour, and even more so a minute. But already at the beginning of the 18th century, watches were being made, the error of which was less than one hundredth of a second per day.
16. Now it is very difficult to believe in it, but practically until the beginning of the twentieth century, every major city in the world had its own, separate time. It was determined by the Sun, the city clock was set by it, by the battle of which the townspeople checked their own clocks. This practically did not create any inconvenience, because the travels lasted very long, and adjusting the clock upon arrival was not the main problem.
17. The unification of time was initiated by British railroad workers. Trains were moving fast enough for the time difference to become meaningful even for the relatively small UK. On December 1, 1847, the time on British Railways was set to the time of the Greenwich Observatory. At the same time, the country continued to live according to local time. General unification took place only in 1880.
18. In 1884, the historic International Meridian Conference was held in Washington. It was on it that resolutions were adopted both on the prime meridian in Greenwich and on the world day, which subsequently made it possible to divide the world into time zones. The scheme with a change in time depending on geographical longitude was introduced with great difficulty. In Russia, in particular, it was legalized in 1919, but in fact it started working in 1924.
Greenwich meridian
19. As you know, China is an ethnically very heterogeneous country. This heterogeneity has repeatedly contributed to the fact that at the slightest trouble, a huge country was constantly striving to fall into pieces. After the communists seized power throughout the mainland of China, Mao Zedong made a strong-willed decision - there will be one time zone in China (and there were as many as 5). Protesting in China has always cost itself more, so the reform was accepted without complaint. Gradually, residents of some areas got used to the fact that the sun can rise at noon and set at midnight.
20. The adherence of the British to tradition is well known. Another illustration of this thesis can be considered the history of the family business selling time. John Belleville, who worked at the Greenwich Observatory, set his watch exactly according to Greenwich Mean Time, and then told his clients the exact time, appearing in person. The business started in 1838 was continued by the heirs. The case was closed in 1940 not because of the development of technology - there was a war. Until 1940, although precise time signals had been broadcast on the radio for a decade and a half, customers enjoyed using Belleville's services.
