Keeping Time

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Welcome to stuffyoushadknow, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and

we're just hanging out, and we decided hey, let's do some talking about timekeeping, so

that's what we're doing today.

Yeah, Lydia helped us put this one together, I think the charge was hey, how about something

on the history of timekeeping, without getting two in the weeds about how all of these things

work, because that's a whole other thing, like if you want to really break down clocks

and watches, but I think she did it just right, the Goldilocks Zone, as they say.

Oh nice, nice astronomical cosmological reference there.

Well, I think that is a reference for a lot of things, right?

Nope, just that.

Okay, where'd you get this idea, because this was when you came up with?

You know, man, I don't know, I think I was maybe thinking about a watch on my wrist,

and then wondering, or no, maybe I saw someone had a, what do you call those things, an hour

glass, and I was wondering about just hour glasses, and then I started thinking about like

just, you know, the concept of time, and when people started keeping time, and I was

kind of had a hunch that I was right, that, you know, the need to keep time didn't come

around until much later, so like, as we'll see, early time keeping was more like seasonal,

or astrological, and it didn't get to be a thing like, hey, I have an appointment at a certain

minute, until much, much later.

Yeah, but earlier than you'd think, or earlier than I thought, at least.

Yeah, agreed.

So speaking of time keeping, you really can kind of say the whole thing just started out with

the sun, and one of the neat things about life on earth is that you can cast a shadow,

most things cast a shadow, with the exception of maybe like a me-bay or something like that.

But if you put like a stick in the ground, it's going to cast shadows that move throughout

the day, and if you really pay attention to this kind of stuff, you can actually use it to

track time throughout the day. And that is almost certainly the earliest way that humans track time,

and the stick they put in the ground is widely known as a nomon, a GNOMN. I think it means

broad, in Greek maybe, I also saw that it was slaying in Greek for penis.

Not really?

Yeah. And that just, just like, hey, to check out the nomon on that guy?

Yeah, almost exactly that, if not that, but just said in ancient Greek.

Oh, okay, gotcha, in Hellenic.

But just tracking the shadow that the nomon cast, hopefully just a stick in the ground.

That was early time keeping.

Oh man, I have a thousand jokes, I'm just going to walk right past this point.

Good for you, buddy, you're a pro.

I know, growing up here at 54.

So that was, yeah, that's what people use for the longest time, and that eventually, as you

will see, would carry over to things like sundials. But it's no surprise that China was way ahead

of the game as far as time keeping goes, because the oldest surviving sort of actual thing that we

have comes from Northern China from an archaeological site that they found dated back to 2,300 BC.

And again, as you'll see, this is a recurring theme, like I mentioned, it wasn't necessarily like,

hey, we got to keep the time from day to day. It's more like, let's calculate the seasons,

or you know, the things happening up in the sky.

Right, because it was snowing in the middle of China and somebody said, what season is it?

And somebody else said, let's find out with this nomon, and the other person's like, no,

no, pull that out, and they're like, no, I mean the stick.

They said, you can get canceled for that.

So if you're like, well, that sounds a lot like a sundial. You're right. The thing that sticks

up for the sundial is a nomon. There's another version of it that's even earlier than the sundial,

it seems, from ancient Egypt called the Shadow Clock. It's actually really hard to describe.

It's much easier to just go look up, but imagine a capital T laying flat on its back on the ground,

and it's raised its head and neck up to look at its feet. That's essentially-

That's kind of perfect, actually. Thank you. I really thought about that one for a while,

I had to admit. But the shadow that that crossbar, the top of the T, casts on the rest of the T

over the day, is demarcated. So you can track six hours a day as the sun is rising in the east,

and then you turn it around at noon, and then you track the next six hours as the sun is setting in

the west. Pretty spectacular considering that's close to 3,000 years old.

Yeah, for sure. For that descriptor, did it help you that you were laying flat on your back

with your neck raised up looking at your feet? Yeah, sadly, I have to admit that I had to go

lay down and figure it out myself. Okay, that's good. But yes, I was. Yeah, nice work.

Finally to the sundial, the first round sundial that we kind of know as a sundial seems like it

was created by a Greek philosopher named Annex Mander, very cool name, not Alexander, but Annex

Mander of Malatus. This was six century BC. But again, probably still tracking seasons at this point.

The first sundials out of Greece that actually marked hours like when people started keeping track

of the hourly time, and as we'll see it, you know, it just gets more specific until we

eventually much later, we'll get to minutes. But the hourly timekeeping started in 350 BCE.

Yeah, and then very quickly after that, around 280 BCE, they came up with the hemic cycle,

which is imagine like a cube block of stone with a basin, a bowl carved out of the middle,

and then they managed to cut it perfectly in half so that you just have half of a bowl.

That's a hemic cycle because it turns out all you need is half a bowl to make a sundial like that.

And I really do wonder if somebody built them like that. Like they'd make one split it in two,

and then all of a sudden they had two hemic cycles to sell. I bet you're getting really good at

describing things at this juncture in your career. It took me long enough for almost a year 18.

It's dismaying to try to explain something and just make it even more confusing than it was initially.

I finally got dismayed enough that I decided to do something about it, and what I did was lay down

naked and think it over. By the way, quick correction because a listener just wrote in about this,

we're about to be at your 19 and completed your 18 technically. No, really?

Yeah, because your 19 and your 20 are the two next years.

Does that make sense? It does, but I feel like it's wrong because

started in April 2008 and going to April of 2026, that's 18 years.

Completed. I see. Yeah, I should have known. Right, when somebody busted out math,

I should have been like, that's right.

The cool thing about the hemic cycle, besides the fact that people back then probably said,

is that thing a hemmy when they walked by? You know, it couldn't resist that one, but they

knew at that point, it was a pretty smart thing that the sun's position changes over the course

of the year, over the course of those seasons, obviously shorter winter hours, which we're going to

get to, but they accounted for that. They had sundials that would show the time using multiple

arcs carved into the hemisphere to account for that sun changing over the course of the year.

Yeah, so like the lines of the hours went up like longitude and then the seasons were like

latitude, and I guess just depending on how high up or how shallow the shadows were,

you could tell what season it was because it was within one of those arcs or two of those arcs

or three or four, right? Yeah, and you know, I mentioned the seasonal hours. When Greek sundials

started dividing daytime into 12 equal parts, obviously not hours because we eventually ended

up at 24, like not hours as we know it, but they would depend on the length of the season, so it's

not like they accounted for it, so they were all uniform. It was just like, hey, sometimes during

the year, they will one day call an hour as longer than others, which would lead to some kind

of a cool thing where ancient texts in Greece would refer to that like a winter hour is something

that could be done in a shorter amount of time, like that'll just take you a winter hour.

Yeah, and this was, so this was the ancient Greeks. This lasted well into the medieval period.

That's how people did hours. The hour was longer in the summer. The hour was shorter in the

winter, and it was essentially their way of what we do for daylight savings time by adjusting.

Yeah, except we're just, you know, modern humans are way too anal to just let it kind of flow

like that. Still got to be exact, you know? Right, right. Okay, so you got the sundial and everybody

was like, well, we move around a lot and not every place has a sundial, but I always want to know

what time it is. And what humans do is take a technology and figure out how to shrink it

down into a portable size. And they did that with sundials too, usually made of bronze.

And because they were mobile, they would also have settings and often instructions on how to

adjust it depending on where you were in the world. Like some of the ancient ones that have been

found have like just put it to this setting if you're in a can stay in Tenoepolar, put it in this

setting if you're in Luxor, right? And then other ones you kind of have to figure it out a little

more based on latitude, but they were portable and essentially they were like pocket watches,

but amazing bronze spheres sometimes. Yeah, so like once they could do that, they would hang it,

facing the sun so that that little pointers, I guess it was still called a no-mon at this point.

I would think so. I think some people still call them no-mon when they're referring to sundials.

Yeah, I think you're right. But they would face the sun so that that pointer's shadow would hit

the correct hour. Later on they had different types that had like a pinhole that let the beam

of sunlight come through and actually shine a mark on the hour, which was like super advanced

at the time. Yeah, it was like the staff of raw model. Oh, yeah. So there was a big reason that

people were keeping track of the hours in ancient Rome, especially by the time Rome came around.

It wasn't necessarily to keep appointments, although they certainly had that kind of thing,

or to keep time on stuff. One of the big things over the years in different cultures,

it turns out, was they needed to time things, especially for something like drawing water.

Like water was a communal resource and everyone had a certain allotment and they would

divvy up those allotments, not by measuring how much water was taken up, but take as much water as

you can within this, you know, before this beam of sunlight reaches this little line essentially,

right? Yeah, yeah. But in Rome, they had an extra reason for it. And that was because the hours

of every single day, or the first 12 hours of every single day, because it wasn't initially that

they were also like, let's track the nighttime too. They just trekked from sunrise to sunset

typically. Yeah. Each of those hours was associated with the different astrological

science called planetary hours. And it was because so you could maximize

whoever you are worshipping. So like if you were worshipping saline, the moon goddess,

you wanted to do that three hours after sunrise on Monday. And so you would use some sort of

timekeeping device to keep track of that. Yeah. And the same, of course, is true in Islam. Once

that became a big thing, the Muslims adopted sundials because they're, you know, have to pray

and different increments at different times. So it was really to kind of keep up with their prayer

hours. And they are the ones who came up with, like if you have a sundial in your garden,

it's a little thing, which we have one of those about one for nearly a few years ago.

That kind of sundial is what the Muslims came up with, the one that's got the flat circular

base. And that nomon is, am I saying that right? Yeah. The nomon is parallel to the polar

axis of the planet Earth. Yeah, they also laid trigonometry on the whole thing. And came up with a

bunch of different kinds of sundials. There's one that was conical. And remember the hemicycle?

Imagine taking that and just kind of squishing the bowl and adjusting it at an angle.

That's what a conical sundial is. They look amazingly cool. So I say look one of those up.

And then finally, I think before we break, we should give a shout out to early 13th century

Moroccan mathematician Abu Al-Hazan al-Marakushi. Because this is the dude that was finally like,

you know what? Uniform hours is where it's at. And we should start kind of keeping track of this

stuff in a uniform way, like actual real time keeping. And that kind of spread out all over the

world from there. Very nice. Yeah. All right. Well, let's take that break then. It's time.

All right. We'll be right back.

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Okay, Chuck, so we're back and before we move on, I want to say that I finally got it. Reggie Watts.

Or Reggie Watts. Did you listen to it? Yeah, when I was QAing and I got it and I was like,

man, that's zoomed right past me. Well, you were in a thought and I slipped it in there very stealthily.

It was very great. All right, nice little treat. We're talking about the national radio quiet zone

episode, by the way, everybody. That's right. So you got Sundials. Next thing that we moved on to

is water. A bunch of different cultures came up with water clocks. It's not clear if it, again,

it started in China and moved to Greece and then moved to the Muslim countries. Who knows? But it's

also possible that people came up with this. There were just so many things available to you to use

to try to keep track of time. And there were really simple water clocks. Water was eventually used

to run mechanical clocks. But the first ones, essentially, were almost our classes made of water.

Yeah, essentially what you're doing is you're either keeping track of time by water draining out

of something that's marked by increments or filling something up that's marked by increments, right?

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, that's essentially it. And you could supplement Sundials with these

because on a sundial, if it was really overcast, you had no idea what time it was. At night,

these things worked as well. Really, there were two problems with them. One was that they would freeze

if it was freezing. Your water clock probably wouldn't work quite as well. And then also,

the viscosity of water can change depending on variables like temperature and stuff like that. So

they weren't entirely accurate or reliable all the time. But they did the trick for enough time

that people started to improve on them and add different kind of engineering principles,

like floats and valves and siphons to regulate water more accurately.

Yeah, I wonder if there was ever like, sorry, I'm late, you know, we had a cold snap,

my water clock froze. You got to move those things inside, buddy. I guarantee somebody used that excuse.

Yeah, for sure, but because of the issues with water and temperature and stuff like that,

Mercury became a pretty reliable substitute. This was in 10th century CE. And it was a Chinese

engineer who figured this out. And that basically, you know, solved a lot of the problems because

Mercury wouldn't freeze. It wouldn't have different viscosities at different temperatures. And it

would ensure that you're on time to that appointment. Yeah. And that engineer was Zhang Cijun.

Show off. I was just going to walk right past that. Here's my favorite kind of early. Me too.

Is it? Yeah, I'm surprised. Yeah, incense clocks. Yeah. And I'm not even into incense anymore.

I was in college. I think like most people are. Same here. I used to burn some frankincense, man.

Yeah, me too. But I really love this one. This existed in China at least since the sixth century CE,

also in other parts of Asia and Korea and Japan for sure. But it's, I love the idea because essentially,

it's, it's almost like a fuse. And as we'll see, it sometimes was a literal fuse. But incense was

burned and used as a timer, like how, how quickly does that thing burn down and stop burning?

Yeah, the coolest ones though were incense clocks that were like a box. And it was essentially

like an intricate maze that you would pack with incense and then light it. And there were different,

I guess, stencils that you put on top of the box to create different times. So like if you wanted

an hour, there was a very simple maze. If you wanted the whole night, it was a much more intricate

maze. And that's another thing I would say to look up. There's a lot of stuff you should go and

look up throughout this episode. And incense clocks are definitely one of them. Yeah, but I'm glad

you saved this one for me because I think it's the coolest part about all of the incense clock stuff

is that they had different scents. And it just makes sense over the course of a night where you could

smell the time. So you knew when a certain smell came up, what time it was, which I think is super,

like ingenious in its simplicity and also like, you know, it happens at sandalwood time.

Sexiest time. Yeah, I've got jokes that I'm keeping in myself. Yeah, good. There were also alarm

clocks you could use the heat from an incense stick, I guess or whatever, to basically burn through

a thread and drop a bunch of like bells or something into a metal dish that will wake you up for

sure every time. And apparently Chinese messengers would take incense and light one end and put

the other end between their toes and wake themselves up like that, which is man, just drink a bunch

of water. That's all you need to do. Don't burn your toes. Yeah, that's true. But like I said,

that's like literally lighting a fuse and it like, you know, you get the hot foot and you know,

it's time to get up and deliver the mail or whatever. That's right. We also have candle clocks that

came along. This is the medieval era, notably Alfred the Great. Supposedly would get his day

together and time it by six candles. Each would burn for about four hours. So six times four,

24. Yeah, you could also take say a four hour candle and break it like just mark equal lines

across it and basically track of time like that too. Then there's astralabes. I'm not even going

to try to really describe an astralabes. Go look those up. They are incredibly intricate

mechanically. They were invented by Muslims in I think the six century CE. So it's just amazing

that they were able to do this. And astralabes were used at sea until the sexton came along

about a thousand years later essentially. That's how effective they were. But you could navigate

with them. You could survey with them. You could also keep time with them because you'd just adjust

the astralabes to mimic the stars or something like that. And you can be like, oh, it's 230.

It's sandalwood time. That's right. It's sandalwood time. Then we finally get to the hour glass.

But later than you think, and especially, and I'm glad Olivia dug deep because she's a great

researcher. But if you just sort of do cursory internet research, you might find a lot of people

saying it's ancient Egypt. But that's probably not the case. It's actually much later than that.

Probably the late medieval period that hour glasses came along and actually after the mechanical

mechanical clock. That's nuts. The earliest known reference is in Italy in 1338. And you think

an hour glass is pretty easy to make. Like, you know, you just blow the glass in a certain way and

throw the sand in there. But sand is spenicky as you know, as far as humidity and moisture goes. So

you had to get the sand in there. You had to seal it up. But you couldn't seal it up with any kind

of moisture because it would clump up. So it's a little trickier to make an hour glass than you

might imagine. Yeah. When it's humid out, the soap opera days of our lives never get started. Right.

It's sad. Was that the one you watched in college? I think that's what people wrote in and said,

yeah, I'm pretty sure. I couldn't remember. Okay. So one of the other things humans do when they

have an invention that's popular and widespread, they don't just shrink it down to a miniature

portable size. They also just show off. Yeah. They do whatever they can to make it even cooler.

And there were a succession of inventors in different parts of the world over the years

that did some really neat stuff with, say, like water clocks. One was a guy named Andrew Nicos.

He was from Macedonia and he built what's called the Tower of Winds in Athens. It's this, I think,

hexagon or octagon made of marble that's 15 meters or about 45 feet tall. It's still standing.

But when it was in use, it had water clocks, it had sundials. You could gauge the wind. You could

tell what was going on. Celestially, he just basically packed every needle time keeping invention

that was around at the time into this thing. Yeah. And like you said, a lot of people just started

getting just sort of fancy with it and actually just really creative. In eighth century CE,

there was a Chinese Buddhist monk who along with this colleague created a clock that was a water

powered wheel, had a gear system. This is when gears really started becoming a huge thing in time

keeping. And it did a single rotation every 24 hours, which you think like, all right, it just

sounds sort of regular. But it also had like bells chiming on the hour and it had a drum beat that

chimed every quarter hour. So this is when like kind of hearing chimes and things to tell you what

time it was came in. It went, but it's every 15. That's right. There's a guy named Susong who is

very famous for his 35 foot. I also saw it described as 40 foot clock tower. One of the things it did

were there were mannequins that came out and rang gongs. Yeah. Like you usually associate this

with like maybe some sort of cuckoo clock or something like that. This is from the 11th century.

So it's pretty, pretty impressive that he came up with this. And again, it was a water

clock. Like this is running on water. And then someone else who put water clocks to great use

was a just this amazing inventor and engineer. His name was Ismael Al-Jazari. He was from Upper

Mesotemia. And his whole thing was not just accurate clock timekeeping. But just essentially delightful

little add-ons that did some cool stuff. He created what's called the castle clock. That's pretty

neat. But for my money, look up the elephant clock. There's a life size replica of it in a museum,

I think in Saudi Arabia. And you can see, you know, how it works and what it does. But essentially

water just moves from part to part. There's a scribe in the middle riding on the elephant. There's

another person on the front of the elephant driving it. There's another guy way up that plays

symbols and stuff. It's just amazing, especially when you learn about how every single step works.

Yeah. I think you sent that to me. That was super cool looking. Yeah. Very ornate.

Now we kind of get to the point. Should we break her? Can we keep going? Yeah. Let's take a break.

All right, we'll be right back.

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bourbon street chicken and andui penne, the new bayou shrimp bowl, and the new Big Easy Burger topped

with andui sausage. You can now celebrate Mardi Gras anywhere, not just in New Orleans, thanks to

the Big Easy menu at Applebee's. The Big Easy is back at Applebee's, starting at just $11.99.

Good food, better company. Limited time, price participation, and selection may vary, tax

and gratuity excluded. We've all had the experience of calling a business and just wanting to talk

to a real person. Not an automated voice pretending to be human, an actual person who can listen and

understand and offer help. That's exactly what you can do with Ruby. Ruby is the virtual receptionist

company that takes care of your callers when you're unavailable in the middle of something you're

simply don't want to pick up. That's right. They can answer screen transfer calls, they can take

messages, collect payments, book appointments, and more, all while making the people you serve feel

special. Best of all, it can help you be more productive. For example, 9 out of 10 lawyers who use

Ruby log more billable hours per day than the national average. And other professionals like

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But whatever kind of small business you run, Ruby is built to save you time, earn you more customers

or clients and make meaningful connections with the people you serve. It's available 2477,

365 days a year and 100% based in the US. See why more than 15,000 small businesses use Ruby.

Visit Ruby.com or better yet, call them at 844-900-R-U-B-Y.

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All right, so we're back to wrap it up on clocks and eventually,

spoiler watches. But we're at the point now where clocks kind of start ticking and we're getting

closer and closer to keeping track of seconds, although that'll be a second till we get to it.

But as for mechanical clocks go, those water powered Chinese clocks arguably were the first

mechanical clocks. And again, it's one of those things where they don't know if people invented

these in Europe or their Muslim world at the same time or if it kind of spread out from one

place to another. Another origin story is maybe mechanical clocks came from Europe with,

is it, would it be Gerbert? I think so. Gerbert of Aralach, who is a French scholar,

but you might know him a little better as Pope Sylvester the second.

Oh, okay. Because he would come up later on. He developed, I guess in his pre-pop days,

a mechanical time, timekeeping device, like truly mechanical and 996 CE. But then it took a

few hundred years for it to become like for mechanical clocks to become a real thing. It didn't

really catch on. Right, which makes some people suspect that that he might not have actually done

that. Yeah. So what's happened here, I guess? We've transitioned from tracking the movement of water

to track time to actually using the kinetic energy in water that's, say, flowing downhill to run

gears and stuff like that. Those are the mechanical time devices that were some of the original

mechanical. It's like the Chinese came up with this very long time ago. When Europe got involved,

they removed water to run gears and replaced them with weights. But it's the same principle at work,

like if you hold a weight up on a rope and let it fall down, gravity's going to pull it toward

the earth and it's releasing kinetic energy. If you can control its descent, you can use that

to turn gears and to keep track of time in a very specific way. I mean, it's not nearly as accurate

as anything we track time with today, but it was still pretty impressive that they were making

these in like the 13th century. Yeah, for sure. There was a monk in 1271 named Roberta Anglicus,

who he talked about, there was actually a Latin term, Horologia, which is the Latin term for time

measuring device. And they were using weights to turn wheels like exactly one time over the course

of one day. And again, they would get kind of break that down and get more specific as they

learn more about gears and how the weights work. But you know, the weights, if you look at a grandfather

clock or a cuckoo clock, like these things all have, and we'll get to the pendulums, not only

pendulums in a grandfather clock, but it's weights that are still operating this thing.

Yeah. And one of the inventions that really kind of, it was a game changer. It's called the

Virgin Folioct Mechanism. Essentially, you remember in Crotty Kid 2, where all of those Okinawan

villagers are sitting there playing their hand drums? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So that's essentially a

Virgin Folioct kind of. Imagine the drum part is the, I think, folioct, and the verge is the

handle. And when there's like a crown wheel, the gear, the main gear that operates a clock,

when it turns, it turns the folioct. And the folioct turns like slowly one way and then slowly

back another. And when it moves back in position, the gears allowed to turn. So you're actually

controlling the kinetic energy of those weights that's falling and making the whole thing move.

And by doing that in a precise way, that's how you can keep track of time.

Yeah. And you know, it stays constant because that thing is constantly stopping and starting. So

it's going to keep that weight from picking up momentum as it goes down and descends. So that's

how you get the constant speed. And that's also how you can create a ticking sound. It's just that

little, you know, constant intermittent movement. Yeah. And the, but you wouldn't, it doesn't move like

a Okinawan hand drum moves. I mean, it moves not as fast, I should say. That'd be to be our

to control clock. Yeah. Didn't that drum move faster and faster? The more intense that the

scene's got in that movie. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Man, it really helped build the suspense. I think

during the main fight, maybe. Yeah. I mean, this is a pretty smart device for a movie.

It was a good sequel. As far as sequels go, they didn't just, you know, build on the last one.

They really kind of went all out and recreating things. Yeah. And one of the great bad movies of

all time, and I'm, I'm lobbying to get on a friend of the show, The Flop House, the best bad

movie podcast out there, in my opinion, to do a Karate Kid 3, which is hugely entertaining as a

bad movie. Is that even worse than Jaden Smith's Karate Kid? Because I heard that was pretty bad.

I didn't see it, but Karate Kid 3. Oh, man, if you're into a fun, bad movie to watch with people,

Karate Kid 3 is one. And that was one where I thought I'd talked about it on the show at some point,

but where God Ruby was probably like six years old and came up with legit her first quality joke

watching that movie. Can you share it? I don't know if it would translate. I'll tell you later.

Okay. That's fine. Yeah. But good for her. Six is a good age to come up with a quality joke.

Bye. Actually, I think I could actually there's a recurring thing in that movie that happens where

every time the bad guys come into a place, they turn the light off. Like they'll come into a warehouse

to fight and they turn the light off. It happened like two or three times. And I kept going like,

what is going on? It's so weird. And then later in the movie, they, they rush out and find Daniel

son and Miyagi and a forest. And Ruby said, that'd be funny if they reached over to a tree and turn

the moon off. That's good. That is a quality joke. It's pretty good joke. Yeah. Yeah, I haven't seen

the Karate Kid 3. I know of it. I know Hillary swank the Karate Kid in that one. No, no, no, no.

Well, maybe I'm getting the number wrong. Karate Kid 3 was was actually Daniel and Miyagi still.

Oh, was it? Yeah. Unless I have it out of order, it's not, but I know it's not the Hillary swank one

obviously. Okay. All right. Yeah. So it's either three or four. Well, I haven't seen the one

you're talking about either. I don't remember anybody turning off any lights anywhere. Yeah, it's

truly bad in a great way. Okay. So just like in the Muslim world, timekeeping pieces in Europe were

initially to keep people on track for daily prayers. Apparently monks and monasteries prayed seven

times a day, but there were also meals. There was also beer brewing time. And so these early clocks,

they're using the virgin folio mechanism in weights, they help keep the monks on track.

Monks are associated with churches. So very soon after that, churches started keeping

clocks as well. And fun fact, one of the reasons that churches often have very, very tall

steeples, often with bells on top is because those used to be parts of the clock. To run a clock

so big that it can ring that bell, you need to have very heavy weights. They're coming and descending

from a very high place. Yeah, for sure. Nice little factoid there. I love that one. And the oldest

surviving mechanical clock is in a church. It was built for the Salisbury Cathedral. That was in

1386. But these clocks didn't have a face yet. It was still, you know, like ringing a bell kind of

thing to know what time it was. And in fact, the word clock comes from the French word. Is it

cloche, I guess? Like that glass thing dome you put over stuff? Yeah, which is a bell. But

you know, it wasn't too long after that that they said, hey, if we can have a clock turning gears,

how hard would it be to actually put a sundial kind of like thing on the front of it and turn

the gears of a hand so people could actually see what time it was. And they went, not that hard,

we can do that. They're like, are you talking about a moving nomon? And the monks said that's

exactly what I'm talking about. That's right. So there's this really interesting take on all that,

the fact that clocks started tracking time in monasteries and then churches and the cities

that were built around churches would all hear the bell. So people knew what time it was all of a

sudden. It wasn't like the sky's purple. So I better milk the cows. It was like, oh, it's

one in the afternoon. So I better milk the cows, right? Because apparently the sky would turn

purple at one in the afternoon in medieval Europe. And there's a philosopher named Lewis Mumford.

I think he was working in the 1930s. And he says that, that is the birth of the modern era,

not steam power that came hundreds of years later. Right. We're moving people from the rhythms,

the natural rhythms of the day and imposing time on them. All of a sudden you could be like, be

at my blacksmith's shop at three or else you're fired, you know? That I would have dragged. Exactly.

I think that's a really good case that he makes. Yeah. No, totally. I mean, it was a real game

changer. And that's when everyone got a little bit more uptight, I imagine. I imagine as well.

And we still didn't have minutes at this point, like those clocks that we were talking about,

you know, grinding those gears around. You could still have a, you know, a decent hour as far

as accuracy goes. The word minute actually to mean what we minute didn't even come around until

the late 14th century. So minutes are a relatively modern thing if you consider 14th century modern.

Right. And thanks for letting me take that Lewis Mumford little tidbit.

No, yeah. Did you like that one? I love it. It's almost as good as the different smells of

incense. Yeah. Well, you know, we'd like to scratch each other's back. Another joke skipped.

So you can take weights and their kinetic energy. And really now you can do, you can take anything

that has kinetic energy and use it to control its release. And you can use that to do things

like drive gears and things like that. And you can use those gears to keep time with.

Well, a coiled spring has a lot of kinetic energy. And replacing the weights in clocks with

coiled springs meant they became portable because of course humans love to make things portable.

Yeah, but they were still pretty inexact because friction is a thing. So depending on like how

well it's made, how well it was lubricated, if it was hot, if it was humid, that would,

that would make just change the way clocks work. So they were still pretty inexact at this point.

So sundials were still kind of preferred. Water clocks were still preferred for a long time.

And actually more precise. If you really want to jump forward in precision,

you can look no further than Galileo Galilei and the turn of the 17th century. And he was the one

that kind of came up with this idea of a pendulum when he started measuring the movement of lamps

swinging on a cord using his own pulse beat as a reference. Pretty cool. Yeah. So he found like,

you can use a pendulum to keep time. And the reason why is a pendulum swing is divided in exactly

and half time wise. Right? So that's what's called a harmonious oscillator. Each swing to the

left or the right is the exact same amount of time. And even more than that, when a pendulum loses

energy, that doesn't change. The arcs just get a little shorter, but they're still equal to one

another. Right? So Galileo figured out that you could use that information to build a clock. He

developed a clock. He never built it because he kept being called away by the indigo girls to help

them get through life. So he was unable to build it. His son started to build it. But as Galileo

always said that boy never finished anything that he started. He didn't complete it. And finally,

in 1656, the Dutch mathematician Christian Hugins, the son Galileo always wanted. He ended up

creating that clock. The first pendulum clock that Galileo had kind of come up with. Yeah, that was

in 1656. And almost right after that, there was an English scientist named Robert Hook with an E

of the N said, you know what, I can make that thing better. And he replaced the verge with, you know,

that we mentioned earlier with something called an anchor escapement, which was just a new mechanism

to regulate the swing, I guess. But that allowed the arc of the pendulum to be reduced from about a 100,

I'm sorry, a hundred degree swing to four to six degrees, which again meant you could pack it in

a packageable size. Yeah. And also they found that less of a swing, they found that the less wide

the arc, the more accurate the timekeeping was. Anchor escapements are almost impossible to

explain unless you see it actually happening. And they're like, oh, okay, that totally makes sense.

But I say go look up a video of how anchor escapements work because it's pretty amazing.

And so because you have slower moving pendulums, they require less power, which means you need

less weight. And eventually there's a guy named William Clement who put all of this stuff together.

And in 1680 came up with what we now call grandfather clocks. And because of everything that

kind of developed from Galileo on, climate was able to add a minute hand. And now all of a sudden,

you knew what minute it was of the hour, thanks to William Clement. That's right. And of course,

you're referring to the long case clock. It didn't get the name grandfather clock until 1820,

I'm sorry, 1876. And that's actually from a song called my grandfather's clock. And that's

where it's about, I mean, it's kind of a sad song about a clock that this this guy had who

or his grandfather had and quit working when he died. And it was a really popular song. So long case

clocks became my grandfather's clock. And the singer and I think writer was a guy named Henry Clay,

not Henry Clay people, but Henry Clay work. You know, that's a redux of our first short stuff.

I thought we had talked about that, right? That was the very first one. Yeah, grandfather clocks.

Man. So pendulum clocks, everyone said, this is great. I love these long case slash grandfather clocks.

But finally in the 20s, people had figured out, I guess centuries before in the 19th century,

A century before that you could keep time with a crystal. They produced reliable oscillations

that you could track for time. And people figured out how to use that on watches. For that,

I would say go listen to our atomic clock episode. Yeah, that was a good one.

From crystal, a quartz came atomic clocks. And from atomic clocks came things like GPS.

It's how your iPhone or Google phone keeps track of the time knows exactly what time it is

thanks to an atomic clock. So we went from sun to water to pendolums to crystals to atoms.

That's right. And by the way, I bet I made that same dumb Henry Clay joke in that short stuff,

didn't I? I'll have to go back and listen, but anytime you get a chance to mention Henry Clay people,

you do. And I support it fully. Of course. For those of you who don't know, the Henry Clay people

was a great band and friends of the show from our good pals, Joey and Andy Sierra, the brothers,

musical brothers, screenwriting brothers, and they did the theme song to the stuff you should know

TV show. That's right. It was a great theme song. Very catchy. And they're still great friends.

I see Joey all the time because he lives in New York now and Andy's still in LA. That's awesome.

Shout out to those dudes. That's right. So we're back. We're back. We're all of a sudden

headed toward watches, everyone. And I mean, this again could be an entire episode on watches,

so we're not going to get to in the weeds. But those spring-based clocks, of course, that spring

was kind of the key in the 15th century, eventually involved to wearable clocks like Flava Flave.

And then then eventually we got to watches by the 16th century. Of course, we're talking about

pocket watches, initially, kind of thing you hang from your vest or your belt or something,

and it was a real fashion statement at the time. But as that technology progressed, they got smaller

and smaller, maybe not more accurate, but just smaller enough to where you could finally put one

on your wrist if you were the Countess of Hungary in 1868. Yeah. Or one of Emperor Wilhelm, the

Second German Naval Officers in 1880. Right. Because before that watches were women's jewelry,

that's what they were considered. Wilhelm II said, nine. Now it's going to be a military gear.

And from World War I, which came a little later, the American and other allied troops who came

back home were like, you should see these hand clocks these guys have. And those became very quickly

starting around the 20s, fashionable in the United States. And I think Great Britain.

And in the 20s, because they became fashion, all of a sudden, there was a lot of attention on hand

clocks. And they became a lot of innovations just kind of started to build very quickly starting

in the 20s. Yeah. And you know, a lot of this stuff that you, a lot of features that you have on

a watch, if you're a watch person, comes from military usage. Like the, of course, I can't remember

any of this because it's off the dome. And I'm a forgetful person. But you know, the watches that

have the little buttons on each side of the winder. And you can like click it to start something and

then click it to stop it. Yeah, stopwatch. No, stopwatch. Just like on a regular wristwatch,

there's, there's a name for it. I mean, I have one of them. I just can't think of it right now.

But it's for a stopwatch function, though, right? Well, yeah, essentially, but as it pertains to

the regular time. But that, that was essentially, I think initially, to keep track of like when you

would launch a, not a missile like the, the kind of bomb you drop in a tube and it shoots somewhere.

Torpedo? Sure. No, like, you know, when you drop a tube and it shoots up in the air,

those things. Yeah, drop a shell into a tube and then like when it would make the explosion,

you would keep track of like, you would time that out so you would know like how far it's going

and calculate that. Oh, smart. I think that's the deal. I hope I'm not wrong. Someone will correct

me. Well, what about water resistance? Yeah, I mean, if you, if you want to dive or just

frolic, then you're going to need a waterproof watch. And that came along with the Rolex,

the Oyster, specifically in 1926. And then in the 1950s, that's when stopwatch functions,

although that was around during the war. So I'm not sure the difference between what I was talking

about in an actual stopwatch. And my favorite feature, which is luminescence, as you know, I kind

of became a bit of a watch guy and I don't have a ton of them, but got like seven watches and one

of them is a is not for real watch people. Okay. They have like dozens and hundreds. But I have one

called a loom tech. And that is the, the most luminescent that you can get, I think, and that thing is

so bright and cool. I just love it. Does it leave like floaters on your vision after you look at it?

No, but if it's like fully charged and go into a dark closet or something, it's like it's super

bright green. And it's awesome. I love it. So you can really time out your spin the bottle.

Oh, you know it. Because I don't want to be in that closet for any longer than half to be. I was

raised Baptist making awkward conversation. Yeah, totally. So if you are like, I want to hear

more about watches TS were pretty much at the end of the episode. But I would recommend going

and listening to our swatch episode because we talked a lot about the transition from mechanical

watches to digital watches in that episode. If I remember correctly, it was pretty interesting.

Yeah, for sure. Chronographs. That's what I'm talking about with the watches, by the way. But what

does it do? It's like a sub dial for the seconds and minutes and hours, I think. So the top

button will be a start stop. And the bottom is a reset. So it did. It would function as like a

stopwatch. Okay. But I think they got their start with timing out shells. I got them when they

exploded. If I'm not mistaken, not torpedoes. Yeah, I think. But again, off the dome. So if I'm

wrong, all apologies. You saying chronograph chronograph reminded me of one little tidbit I forgot

to mention. Remember how we talked about planetary hours and the Romans were like, this is when you

when you worship, you know, Mars or whatever. Yeah. That is where the word horoscope came from.

Horoscope means our marker. Oh, pretty neat, huh? Yeah. I like that. Okay. Nifty. I like it too. And since

Chuck said he likes it, that obviously means it's time for listener mail. That's right. And we

read this from Bill. I guess we would pronounce this Rooshline. Because he asked a question about

the appropriateness of our live show. And we've gotten a few emails. So we thought we'd kind of

get the word out. Hey, guys, been listening for for 10 years since commuting from Erie to Pittsburgh

for a new job. You fill countless hours of boredom with education and smiles as my family.

And I now listen to your show almost weekly. And my now almost 11 year old son has grown up listening

to you guys. Since shortly after he was born. Nice. So we're coming to your show in Akron, Ohio.

And we're pretty ecstatic about that. We can't wait to come. But I was hoping to respond and let

me know what the content is appropriate for our 11 year old to come. We're loose with what he's

allowed to listen to. And don't try and shield them too much from the world. Everything you put out

is educational. For instance, the Operation Mints Meet episode is one of our favorites. But

there's anything particularly mature like murder stuff or like the Lizzy Borden episode.

We should probably be responsible parents and Bill and others. We're here to say that

we're not going to reveal the topic. But this one is very much kid-appropriate. The only thing you

might hear we like to delight people with a few odd curse words here and there. Because we don't

do it on the show. But it's still what do you call it? PG PG. 13 PG 11 maybe. Yeah, okay.

These days. Yeah. I would even say depending on the kid maybe PG eight. We get some fairly young

kids at our shows. And I've never seen a parent leave with the child. They usually just leave behind.

I think in Scotland, didn't that one family leave? Yeah, I still don't understand that. We didn't

say anything even remotely offensive. And I think they just didn't like the sounds of our voices

or something like that. I don't understand, but I don't think it was anything we said.

Okay, good. Well, content-wise though, this one is super on the up-and-up-and-up-and-kid

appropriate. Nothing scary at all. Super pop culture-y, historical kind of interesting.

But just maybe a curse word or two. Yeah, maybe a blue joke here there, but hopefully over any

kids head. Yeah, that's what we like to do. It's confused children so their parents can explain

on the way home. That's exactly right. That's great, Chuck. That was a good idea. If you're like,

wait, you guys are going on tour, we absolutely are. I would direct you to StuffYouShadow.com

and click on the on tour button. And it will show you all the places you're going to be. And if you

click on those, it will take you to go by ticket. So you can come see us. This is the first time in

years and years, I guess, since we've been on the road. So we're kind of excited about coming back.

We may be a little rusty, but that also usually means that those first couple shows get some high-flying

high jinks. Yeah, get ready. Denver, the mile high city. How appropriate. That's right.

And if you want to get in touch with us like Bill, right? Yes. Bill did. Thanks for that email. Bill

and we'll see you in Akron. You can email us at stuffpodcastatihartradio.com.

Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio,

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