Time Telling through the AgesBrearley, Harry Chase
History
Time Telling through the Ages
Brearley, Harry Chase
Clocks and watches -- History; Time measurements
It is like that to-day among primitive peoples. The Turk who listens
for the crowing of a cock or the braying of an ass to tell him of the
hour, or calls the cat to him to look at its eyes and judge the time by
the shape of their pupils—he is more like the caveman in this than like
ourselves. So is the South Sea Islander, who knows the season of the
year from the direction of the trade-winds. So is the patient savage,
who cares little as to how long he must wait for the creature he is
hunting to come near the spot where he lies hidden.
How different it all is with ourselves! We rise at a certain hour, and
so many minutes later we have our breakfast. At such a time, we must be
at work. Our work itself is all made of appointments one after another,
or of tasks to be finished within a certain time. Our meals, our hours
of rest, our meetings with our friends, our recreations, and our
pleasures—all these, until, again, at a certain time we go to bed, in
order that so many hours of sleep may make us fit for the next day, are
measured by the clock and counted out by the tick of a toothed wheel or
the regular swing of a pendulum.
We say that the savage has no sense of the value of time. We have, and
it is by that fact largely that we are better off than he. Value means
measure; you cannot value a thing unless you can measure it exactly.
And so because we can measure time, we can see what time is worth to
us, and make it worth more. The savage keeps an appointment—when he
happens to make one. But we, because we know how long it takes to reach
a certain place, or how long a time we need or wish to spend with a
certain man, can make and keep many appointments. We can travel like
the wind from place to place, because in measuring time we can measure
speed, and therefore we can make speed safe and possible. We can talk
to a friend a thousand miles away, or signal by electric waves around
the world. We do these things because our sense of time has told us
that the old way of sending letters and messages was too slow. And so
we have set to work to invent ways that should be quicker. We should
never have had the telephone, the cable, or the wireless, unless we had
cared about time and been able to measure it.
The caveman lived, perhaps, as many years as we—but how much did he
do in those years? We, who have learned to measure years and to allot
each day or hour to sundry tasks, have made ourselves able to do far
more in a life-time—many times more. We do not live a greater number of
years, but it is as if we lived many lives in one. We speak of time as
we speak of money, of saving and wasting and spending. Well, Time is
Money, as Ben Franklin said, but it is something more—Time is Life. And
we think of our lives as so much time at our command, and therefore we
can make the most of them. The gulf between us and the primitive men is
a contrast of living less or more, and our _more life_ comes in great
measure from our having learned to _measure time_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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