The first device men had for measuring time was

the sundial, which was invented around 700 B.C. The

early sundial was a hollow half bowl with a bead fixed in
the center. As the sun traveled across the sky, the
shadow of the bead traveled in an arc across the face
of the bowl. The bowl was divided into 12 parts called
hours. The length of those hours varied with the
seasons, as days were longer or shorter. In the summer
an hour might have been half again as long as our hours
now, in the winter only half as long. For 1,600 years
this way of measuring hours by dividingthe daylight
into 12 hours didn’t change.

A minute is the sixtieth part of an hour and a

second is the sixtieth part of a minute. Both of these
measurements are for convenience in dividing time into
useful sections.
 The ancient Babylonians reckoned time more
accurately than the people who came after them for
several thousand years. They used a water clock, the
water running through a hole of a very carefully
calculated size from one jar into another. The time it
took for the water to drip completely through was the
length of the day of the equinox. Day and night are
equal at that time, each lasting 12 hours.

Clocks are among the mopst important measuring

machines ever invented. They change time which we can
neither see nor hold, into a measurement of distance on
the face of the clock where we can measure it easily.

Our modern industry depends on clocks and

timings. Assembly lines run on exact time schedules. In
the manufacture of almost every article around you
there are certain processes that must be timed
precisely.
 China must be baked for an ezact length of time,
glass hardened, paint dried electrically, canned food
process. If you look around your room, you will probably
see dozens of other things that had to be timed when
they were made, some of them to a millionth of a
second. Parts of radio tubes and light bulbs must be
timed as exactly as this.

Our whole world runs on a time schedule. Trains

and planes, schools and businesses, radios, traffic
lights, and the cake for dessert all depend on the clock.

Flyers make a clock out of the sky, so they can call

directions. They imagine it to be a huge clock face with
their planes at the center of the dial. The nose of the
plane points to 12 o’clock. Then iof one man yells,
”Seagull at 2 o’clock,” everybody knows exactly where
to look.
 THE
HISTORY
OF TIME

John Gardose
II - Acacia