History of Time through the Ages

Obelisk

3000 BCE

Early Egyptians used this divice to tell time by the shadow cast by the sun on a fixed object. The obelisk had four sides and was vertical. When place in the sun it cast a shadow. The shadows indicated the suns position each day.

Water Clocks or clepsydra

1000 BCE

Designed by the early Greeks and Egyptians. The water clock used the flow of water as a measurement of time. One bowl shaoed container filled with water had a tiny hole in which water would flow out of in to a container below it. The lower container had marking inside it which indicated how much time had passed when the water had reached it.

Sundails

300 BCE

The people of Babylonia used sundails to tell time. It was a flat circle that had a 12-hour clock face. It was used to tell time in the daylight hours. They added a gnomon which acted like a obelisk and cast a shadow on the dial when the position of the sun changed.

Hourglasses

1200

Used in Europe in the 1200's. They were one of the first portable timekeepers. They were used to tell time independently of the sun. Hourglasses were made of to containers joined at the neck. One of the containers was filled with a substance like sand that moved readily. When a person want to begin telling time they simply would turn the side full of the substance upward and allow it to drain into the lower container. This indicated how much time had passed.

Mechanical Clocks

1300

Used weights and balances to mark periods of time through out 12 hour spans. They wer reather big and did not keep accurate time.

Watches

1400

These were timepieces that could be worn, or carried by people easily. Had a system of coiled springs that helped measure time.

Pendulum

1600

Used by European scientists to increase a clock's accurancy. Letting clocks read time in seconds, minutes and hours. It is a weighted rod that swings side to side and controls the clock's mechanism.

Digital watches

1800

These time keepers are powered by batteries and quartz crystal and normally show the time with numbers. They were first produced in the late 1800's then became more popular in the 1920's

Standard time

1900

Splits the world into 24 equal time zones.

Daylight Savings Time

1916

Setting the clocks one hour ahead of standard time to make it seem that the sun is setting later. It was introduced to give farmers more daylight time in the evenings in the spring and summer.

Universal Time Coordinate

1972

Highly accurate system used as the offical measure of time for planet Earth.