Time Telling through the AgesBrearley, Harry Chase
History
Time Telling through the Ages
Brearley, Harry Chase
Clocks and watches -- History; Time measurements
Civilization is a thing of the spirit, but it has the support of
material things and it has been truly said that the degree of a
people's civilization can be measured by the multiplicity of its needs.
The savage is content with food, shelter and a covering for his body,
but every step in civilization's progress has a more and more complex
material accompaniment, and these interwoven relationships of
modern life in which the question of time is a most important factor
can only be sustained through the use of accurate time-measure. In
other words, modern civilization leans upon the watch.
But here again we have run somewhat ahead of our story which, as a
matter of fact, had only reached the point of primitive sun-dials.
But this anticipation will be excused because of the importance of
emphasizing that the growing interdependence of human relations had
made it necessary to take into account the convenience of a greater
and greater number of people, and this involved closer and closer
time-recording in smaller divisions of time by more exact methods.
The sun-dial underwent so many changes that a volume would be needed
to describe them all. For example, it was found that the shadow of an
upright stick or stone varied from day to day, because, as we have
already noticed, the sun rises farther north in summer in the northern
hemisphere than it does in winter. So the mark for a certain hour would
change as the season changed, and the dial would not indicate time
accurately.
Berosus, a Chaldean historian and priest of Bel, or Baal, a god of the
old Babylonian, lived about the year 250 B. C., and hit upon a very
ingenious way of solving this difficulty. He made the dial hollow like
the inside of a bowl. Into this the shadow was cast by a little round
ball or bead at the end of a pointer that stood horizontally out over
the bowl.
Now the sky itself is like a great bowl or inverted hemisphere, and,
howsoever the sun moved upon it, the shadow would move in the same way
upon the inside of the bowl or hemisphere. And by drawing lines in the
bowl, similar to the lines of longitude upon the map, the hours could
be correctly measured. The "Hemicycle of Berosus," as it was called,
remained in use for centuries and was the favorite form of sun-dial all
through the classic period of Greece and Rome. Cicero had one at his
villa near Tusculum, and one was found, in 1762, at Pompeii.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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