January 20, 2026 • 51 mins
Today, Chuck and Josh walk you through the history of keeping time, from sticks in the sun to atomic clocks.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, just want to give a quick tour update
because we have three shows coming up very very soon
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Speaker 2 (00:08):
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San Francisco, and tickets are still available. You can go
to stuff youshould Know dot com, click on the on
tour button and you can click on get tickets and
it will take you to go get tickets and we
hope to see you guys soon.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
That's right. Denver, you're doing great. Seattle, we love you guys.
San Francisco, we love you guys. So come on out
and see us. How about that.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, we'll see you guys very soon.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
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, do some talking about time keeping,
so that's what we're doing today.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah. Olivia helped us put this one together. I think
the charge was, Hey, how about something on the history
of time keeping? Mm hm 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 Goldilock zone, as they say.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Oh nice, nice astronomical cosmological reference there.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Well, I think that is a reference for a lot
of things, right, Nope, that Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Where'd you get this idea? Because this was when you
came up with.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
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 that call it hourglass, and
I was wondering about just hourglasses, and then I started
thinking about like just you know, the concept of time
(02:01):
and when people started keeping time, and I was kind
of had a hunch and I was right that, you know,
the need to keep time didn't come around til much later.
So like as we'll see, early timekeeping was more like
seasonal or astrological, and it didn't get to be a
thing like hey, I have an appointment at a certain
(02:22):
minute until much much later.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, but earlier than you'd think, or earlier than I thought.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
At least yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
So speaking of timekeeping, 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 amba or something like that.
But if you put like a stick in the ground,
(02:49):
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 anomon g nom n. I think
(03:10):
it means rod in Greek. Maybe I also saw that
it was slang in Greek for penis. No really, yeah,
and that just.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Just just like, hey, to check out the gnomon on
that guy.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah, almost exactly. If not that, but just said an
ancient Greek Oh okay, got cha hellenic. Yeah, but just
tracking the shadow that the gnomon cast, hopefully just a
stick in the ground. Yeah, that's that was early timekeeping.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Oh man, I have a thousand jokes. I'm just gonna
walk right past at this point.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Good for you. Buddy, you're a pro.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
I know growing up here it's fifty four. So that was, yeah,
that's what people use for the longest time, and that eventually,
as we'll see, would carry over to things like sundials.
But it's no surprise that China was way ahead of
the game as far as timekeeping goes, because the oldest
surviving sort of actual thing that we have comes from
(04:09):
northern China, from an archaeological site that they found dated
back to twenty three hundred 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.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
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 what this nomon And the other person's like, no,
don't pull that out, and they're like no, I mean
the stick.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Right, They said, you can get canceled for that, right.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
So if you're like, well that sounds a lot like
a sun dial, you're right. The thing that sticks up
for the sun dial is a no mon. There's another
version of it that's even earlier than the sun dial,
it seems from ancient Egypt, called the shadow clock. Yeah,
it's actually really hard to describe. It's much easier to
just go look up. But imagine a capital t laying
(05:06):
flat on its back on the ground and it's raised
its head and neck up to look at its feet.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
That's essentially that's kind of perfect. Actually, thank you.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
I really thought about that one for a while. I
have to admit. But the shadow that that crossbar the
top of the tea casts on the rest of the
tea 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 of the
sun is setting in the west. Pretty spectacular considering that's
(05:39):
close to three thousand years old.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Yeah, for sure for that descriptor to help you that
you were laying flat on your back with your neck
raised up looking at your feet.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yeah, nice work. Finally to the sun dial. The first
round sun dial that we kind of know as a
sun dial seems like it was created by a Greek
philosopher name annex Mander, very cool name, not Alexander, but
Annexmander of Malaitis. This was sixth century BC, but again
(06:19):
probably still tracking seasons at this point. The first sun
dials 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 be eventually much later we'll get to minutes. But
the hourly timekeeping started in three point fifty BCE.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, and then very quickly after that, around two to
eighty BCE, they came up with the Hemi 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 Hemi cycle,
Because it turns out all you need is half a
(07:00):
ball to make a sun dial like that. And I
really do wonder if somebody built them like that, like
they'd make the one, split it in two and then
all of a sudden they had two hemicycles to sell.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
I bet you're getting really good at describing things at
this juncture in your career.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It took me long enough for almost two year eighteen.
It is. 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.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
By the way, quick correction because a listener just wrote
in about this, we're about to be at your nineteen
and completed your eighteen technically no really, yeah, because you're
nineteen and you're twenty are the are you know the
two next years? Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (07:52):
It does, But I feel like it's wrong because started
in April two thousand and eight and going to April
of twenty twenty six, eighteen years completed. I see, yeah,
I should have known right when somebody busted out mathis
it's just been like, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
The cool thing about the Hemi cycle, besides the fact
that people back then probably said, is that thing a
hemi 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,
(08:32):
but they accounted for that. They had sun dials that
would show the time using multiple arcs carved into the
hemisphere to account for that sun changing over the course
of the year.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
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 where you could tell what season it
was because it was within one of those arcs, or
two of those arcs, or three or four.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Right, Yeah, and you know I mentioned the seasonal hours
when Greek sun dials started dividing daytime into twelve equal parts.
Obviously not hours, because we eventually ended up at twenty
four 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, what
(09:22):
they will one day call an hour is 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.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah, And 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.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, except where just you know, modern humans are way
too anal to just let it kind of flow like
that still got to be exact, you.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Know, right, right, Okay, so you got the sun dial,
and everybody was like, well, we move around a lot
and not every place has a sun dial, 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 sun dials too, usually made of bronze,
(10:21):
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 Constantinople, or put
it in this setting if you're in Luxer, right, and
then other ones you kind of have to figure it
(10:42):
out a little more based on latitude. But they were
portable and essentially they were like pocket watches but amazing
bronze spheres sometimes.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, So, like once they could do that, they would
hang it facing the sun so that that little pointer
I guess it was still called a gnomon at this point, I.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Would think so. I think some people still call them
gnomons when they're referring to sun dials.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Yeah, it was like the staff of raw model.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
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.
(11:50):
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 out, but as
much water as you can within this you know, before
this beam of sunlight reaches this little line essentially, right.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Yeah, But in Rome they had an extra reason for it,
and that was because the hours of every single day,
or the first twelve hours of every single day, because
it wasn't initially that they were also like, let's track
the nighttime too. They just tracked from sunrise to sunset typically. Yeah,
each of those hours was associated with the different astrological sign.
(12:30):
It was called planetary hours, and it was because so
you could maximize whoever you were worshiping. So like if
you were worshiping Seline the moon goddess, you wanted to
do that three hours after sunrise on Monday, and so
you would use some sort of time keeping device to
keep track of that.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah, And the same, of course is true in Islam.
Once that became a big thing, the Muslims adopted sun
dials because they're you know, have to pray and at
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 sun dial in your garden, it's a little thing,
which we have one of those, about one for Emily
(13:10):
a few years ago. Cute. That kind of sun dial
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.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah. They also laid trigonometry on the whole thing and
came up with a bunch of different kinds of sun dials.
There's one that was conical, and remember the Hemi cycle.
Imagine taking that and just kind of squishing the bowl
and adjusting it at an angle. That's what a conical
sun dial is. They look amazingly cool, So I say,
(13:46):
look one of those up.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
And then finally I think before we break, we should
give a shout out to early thirteenth century Moroccan mathematician
Abou al Hasan 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
(14:11):
real timekeeping, and that kind of spread out all over
the world from there.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Very nice. Yeah, all right, well let's take that break.
Then it's time.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
All right, we'll be right back up with Joe shoe
on Chow.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
Stop you shit, okay, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
So we're back, and before we move on, I want
to say that I finally got it. Reggie Watts.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Did you listen to it?
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, when I was qaing and I got it, and
I was like, man, that zuumed right past me.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Well you were in a thought and I slipped it
in there very stealthily.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
It was very great. All right, nice little treat for
we're talking about the National Radio Quiet Zone episode. By
the way, everybody, that's right, so you got sun dials.
Next thing that we moved on to is water. A
bunch of different cultures came up with water clocks. It's
not clear if again it started in China and moved
to Greece and then moved to the Muslim countries. Who knows,
(15:21):
But it's also possible that this that people came up
with us. 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 like almost our glasses made of water.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, I mean, 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.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Right, yeah, pretty much. I mean that's essentially it. And
you could supplement sun dials with these, because on a
sun dial, if it was really overcast, yeah, you had
no idea what time it was at night. These things
worked as well, though really there were two problems with them.
One was that they would freeze. If it was freezing water,
(16:16):
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
(16:39):
valves and siphons to regulate water more accurately.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Yeah, I wonder if there was ever like, sorry, I'm late,
you know, we had a cold snap. My water clock froze,
Like you got to move those things inside, buddy.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I guarantee somebody use that excuse.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
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 tenth 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,
(17:17):
and it would ensure that you're on time to that appointment.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Yeah, and that engineer was Jiang si Jun.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Nay show off. I was just gonna walk right past that.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Here's my favorite kind of early Oh me too, is it? Yeah?
I surprised. Yeah, incense clocks.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, and I'm not even into incense anymore. I was
in college. I think, like most people.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Are same here. I used to burn some frank incense man.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
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 quickly does that
(18:05):
thing burn down and stop burning?
Speaker 2 (18:08):
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'd put
on top of the box to create different times. So
(18:28):
like if you wanted an hour, that 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.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
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 sense
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 and its simplicity,
(19:03):
and also like, you know, you know what happens at
sandal with time, sexiest time.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Yeah, I've got jokes that I'm keeping it myself.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Yeah good.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
There are 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'll wake you
up for sure every time. And apparently Chinese messengers would
take incense and light one end and put the other
in between their toes and wake themselves up like that,
(19:38):
which is man, just drink a bunch of water. That's
all you need to do. Don't burn your toes.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
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
twenty four.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
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 astrolabes.
I'm not even gonna try to really describe an astrolab Yeah, go.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Look those up.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
They are incredibly intricate mechanically. They were invented by Muslims
in I think the sixth century CE, so it's just
amazing that they were able to do this. And astrolabes
were used at c until the sexton came along about
a thousand years later. Essentially, that's how effective they were.
(20:44):
But you could navigate with them, you could survey with them.
You could also keep time with them because you just
adjust the astrolabe to mimic the stars or something like that,
and you can be like, oh, it's two thirty, it's
Sandalwood time.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
That's right, it's Sandalwood time. Then we finally get to
the hour glass. Yes, but later than you think, and
especially and I'm glad Livia 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
(21:17):
that hourglasses came along, and actually after the mechanical clock
that's nuts. The earliest known reference is in Italy in
thirteen thirty eight. And you think an hourglass is pretty
easy to make, like, you know, you just blow the
glass in a certain way and throw the sand in there.
But sanda spinicky as you know, as far as humidity
(21:37):
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 hourglass than you might imagine.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, when it's humid out, the soap opera Days of
Our Lives never get started, right, It's sad.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Was that the one you watched in college?
Speaker 2 (21:59):
I think that's what people wrote in and said, yeah, I'm.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Pretty sure I couldn't remember.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
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 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
(22:25):
did some really neat stuff with say like water clocks.
One was a guy named Andre Nkos. 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 fifteen meters or about forty five feet tall,
still standing, but when it was in use, it had
(22:47):
water clocks that had sundials, you could gauge the wind,
you could tell what was going on celestially. He just
basically packed every Niedo timekeeping invention that was around at
the time end of this thing.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
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 his colleagues, 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. Yeah, and it did a single rotation
(23:24):
every twenty four hours, which you think, like, all right,
that just sounds sort of regular. But it also had
like bells chiming on the hour, and I had a
drumbeat 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.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
It went but in every fifteen that's right. There's a
guy named Sousung who is very famous for his thirty
five foot I also saw it described as forty 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
(24:02):
eleventh century, so it's 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.
(24:22):
He was from Upper Mestamia, 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
(24:43):
of it at 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 there play
symbols and stuff. It's just amazing, especially when you learn
(25:05):
about how every single step works.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Yeah that thing you sent that to me, that was
super cool looking. Yeah, very ornate. Now we kind of
get to the point, shall we break her? Can we
keep going?
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, let's take a break, all right.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
We'll be right back up with Joe shoe on cho.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Stuff is shit.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
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
(26:02):
were their 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 it. Would it be Gerbert? I think so,
(26:24):
Gerbert of Arlac, who was a French scholar, but you
might know him a little better as Pope Sylvester the Second. Oh, okay,
because he would become pope later on. He developed I
guess in his pre pope days a mechanical type timekeeping device,
like truly mechanical in nine ninety six CE. But then
(26:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
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
(27:13):
the original mechanical It's like the Chinese came up with
this a very long time ago. When Europe got involved,
they removed water to run gears and replace 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 gonna pull it toward the Earth and
(27:33):
it's releasing kinetic energy. If you can control its descent,
you can use that to turn gears into keep track
of time in a very specific way. I mean, it's
not nearly as accurate as anything we tracked time with today,
but it was still pretty impressive that they were making
these in like the thirteenth century.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, for sure. There was a monk in twelve seventy
one named Robertus 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
(28:15):
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 and a grandfather clock,
but it's weights that are still operating this thing.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, and one of the inventions that really kind of
it was a game changer. It's called the virgin foliot mechanism. Essentially,
you remember in Karate Kid two where all of those
okay now and villagers are sitting there playing their hand drums. Yeah, yeah, okay,
So that's essentially a virgin of foliot kind of imagine
(28:54):
the drum part is the I think foliot, 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 folliot, and the folliot turns
like slowly one way and then slowly back another and
when it moves back in position, the gear is allowed
(29:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Yeah. And the but you wouldn't it doesn't move like
an Oknawan hand drum moves. I mean, it moves not
as fast, I should say, be out of control clock.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yeah. Didn't that drum move faster faster the more intense
that the scenes got in that movie?
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Hmm, yeah, oh yeah, Man, it really helped build the
suspense I think during the main fight maybe.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Yeah. I mean, this is a pretty smart device for
a movie.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah. And one of the great bad movies of all time.
And I'm lobbying to get on a friend of the
show The Flophouse, the best bad movie podcast out there
in my opinion, to do Karate Kid three, which is
hugely entertaining as a bad movie.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Is that even worse than Jaden Smith's Karate Kid, because
I heard that was pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
I didn't see it. But Karate Kid three, oh man,
if you're into a fun bad movie to watch with people,
Karate Kid three is one. And that was one where
I thought I talked about on the show at some point,
but where God, Ruby was probably like six years old
and came up with, like, legit, her first quality joke
watching that movie.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Can you share it?
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (31:06):
I don't know if it would translate. I'll tell you later.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Okay, that's fine, Yeah, but good for her. Six is
a good age to come up with a quality joke by.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
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 a 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 Miagi in a forest,
(31:36):
and Ruby said, that'd be funny if they reached over
to a tree and turned the moon off.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
That's good. That is a quality joke.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
That's a pretty good joke.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Yep. Yeah, yeah, I haven't seen the karate Kid three.
I know of it. I know Hillary Swank's the karate
kid in that one.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
No, no, no, no, no. Uh, well, maybe I'm getting the
number wrong. Karate Kid three was actually Daniel and Miagi 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.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Well, I haven't seen the one you're talking about either.
I don't remember anybody turning off any lights anywhere.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, it's truly bad in a great way.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Okay, So just back to Just like in the Muslim world,
time keeping 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,
(32:39):
using the virgin folio mechanism and weights, they helped keep
the monks on track. Yeah, 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,
(32:59):
is because 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 there coming and
descending from a very high place.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, for sure, nice little factoid there.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I love that one.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
And the oldest surviving mechanical clock is in a church.
It was built for this Salisbury Cathedral that was in
thirteen eighty six. 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 close?
Speaker 2 (33:39):
I guess like that glass thing dome you put over stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
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 sun dial 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. Yeah, And they went, not that hard, we
can do that.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
They're like, are you talking about a moving gnomon? And
the monk 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 the clocks started tracking time in monasteries and
then churches in the cities that were built around churches
would all hear the bell, so people knew what time
(34:24):
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 nineteen thirties,
(34:44):
and he says that that is the birth of the
modern era, not steam power that came hundreds of years later. Right,
removing 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 shop at
(35:05):
three or else you're fired. You know, that would a
draft exactly. I think that's a really good case that
he makes.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah, no, totally. I mean it was a real game changer,
and that's when everyone got a little bit more uptight, I imagine.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
I imagine as well.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
You know, 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 meant, it didn't even
come around until the late fourteenth century. So minutes are
a relatively modern thing if you consider fourteenth century modern.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Right, and thanks for letting me take that, Lewis mum
for little tidbit.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Well, yeah, did you like that one?
Speaker 2 (35:52):
I love it. It's almost as good as the the
different smells of incense.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Yeah, well, you know, we like to scratch each other's back.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
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 yeah,
(36:27):
replacing the weights in clocks with coiled springs meant they
became portable because of course humans love to make things portable.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Yeah, but they were still pretty inexact because friction is
a thing, So depending on how well it's made, how
well it was lubricated, if it was hot, if it
was humid, that 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
(36:56):
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 Galilee and the turn
of the seventeenth 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
(37:17):
a cord using his own pulse beat as a reference.
Pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Yeah, So he found like you can use a pendulum
to keep time. The reason why, as 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,
(37:43):
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 the clock. He never built it
because he kept being called a way by the Indigo
girls to help them get through life, so he was
(38:04):
unable to build it. His son started to build it,
but as Galileo always said, that boy never finished anything
that he started, so he didn't complete it. And finally,
in sixteen fifty six, the Dutch mathematician Christian Hugens, the
son Galileo always wanted, he ended up creating that clock,
the first pendulum clock that Galileo had kind of come
(38:27):
up with.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Yeah, that was in sixteen fifty six. And almost right
after that there was an English scientist named Robert Hook
with an e of the end, said you know what,
I could make that thing better, and he replaced the
verge with you know that we mentioned earlier, with a
something called an anchor escapement, which was just a new
mechanism to regulate the swing I guess, but that allowed
(38:51):
the arc of the pendulum to be reduced from about
one hundred I'm sorry, one hundred degree swing to four
to six degrees, which again meant you could pack it
in a packageable size.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
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
(39:22):
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 sixteen eighty came up with
what we now call grandfather clocks. And because of everything
(39:45):
that kind of developed from Galileo on, Clement 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.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
That's right, And of course you're referring to the long
case clock. It didn't get the name grandfather clock until
eighteen twenty I'm sorry, eighteen seventy six. And that's actually
from a song called My Grandfather's Clock. 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 it quit working when he died, and
(40:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
You know, that's a redux of our first short stuff.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
I thought we had talked about that, right, that was
the very first, the very first one.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Huh yeah, grandfather clocks man, so pendulum clocks. Everyone said,
this is great. I love these long case slash grandfather clocks.
But finally, in the twenties people had figured out, I
guess centuries before, in the nineteenth century, a century before
that you could keep tying with a crystal. They produced
(41:03):
reliable oscillations that you could track for time, and people
figured out how to use that and watches for that.
I would say, go listen to our atomic clock episode.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah, that was a good one.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Out From crystal quartz came atomic clocks, and from atomic
clocks came things like GPS. It's how your iPhone or
you know, 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 pendulums to
(41:37):
crystals to atoms.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
That's right. And by the way, I bet I made
that same dumb Henry Clay joke and that short stuff didn't.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
Of course, for those of you who don't know, Henry
Clay People was a great band and friends of the
show whom are a good Joey and Andy Ciarra, the brothers,
musical brothers, screenwriting brothers, and they did the theme song
to the Stuff You Should Know TV show.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
That's right. It was a great theme, very catchy, and.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
They're still a great friends. I see Joey all the
time because he lives in New York now and Andy's
still in LA.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
That's awesome. Shout out.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
That's right. So we're back or not, we're back. We're
all of a sudden headed toward Watches. Everyone mm hm,
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 fifteenth century,
eventually involved to wearable clocks like flava flave, and then
(42:41):
then eventually we got to watch us. By the sixteenth century,
of course, we were 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
(43:02):
were the Countess of Hungary in eighteen sixty.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Eight, yeah, or one of Emperor Wilhelm the Second German
naval officers in eighteen eighty, because before that watches were
women's jewelry, that's what they were considered. Wilhelm the Second
said nine, now it's going to be a military gear. Yeah.
And from World War One, which came a little later,
(43:27):
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 as starting around the twenties
fashionable in the United States, and I think great Britain
and in the twenties 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
(43:51):
of started to build very quickly starting in the twenties.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
Yeah, and you know a lot of this stuff that
you a lot of features that you have on a
watch if you're 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.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
Yeah, stop watch, No, stop.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Watch just like on a regular wristwatch. There's a name
for it. I mean I have one of them. I
just can't think of it right now.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
But it's for a stopwatch function though, right.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Well yeah, essentially, but as it pertains to the regular time.
But that was essentially, I think initially to keep track
of like when you would launch a not a missile,
like the kind of bomb you drop in a tube
and it shoots somewhere torpedo. Sure, No, Like you know
when you drop it in a tube and it shoots
(44:49):
up in the air. 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
in calculat Oh smart, I think that's the deal. I
hope I'm not wrong. Someone will correct me.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Well, what about water resistance?
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yeah, I mean 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 nineteen
twenty six, and then in the nineteen fifties that's when
stop watch functions, although that was around during the war,
So I'm not sure the difference between what I was
(45:29):
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 not for real watch people
they have like dozens and hundreds, but I have one
called a loom Tech and that is the most luminescent
(45:53):
that you can get, I think, And that thing is
so bright and cool. I just love it.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Does it leave like floaters on your vision after you
look at it?
Speaker 1 (46:01):
No, But if it's like fully charging go into a
dark closet or something, it's like, it's super bright green
and it's awesome. I love it.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
So you can really time out your spin the bottle?
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Oh you know it, because I don't want to be
in that closet for me any longer than I have
to be.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
I was raised baptism, making awkward conversation, Yeah, totally. So
if you are like I want to hear more about
watches ts, We're pretty much at the end of the episode,
but I would recommend going and listening to our watch
episode because we talked a lot about the transition from
mechanical watches to digital watches in that episode. If I
(46:41):
remember correctly, it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Yeah, for sure. Chronographs that's what I'm talking about with
the watches, by the way.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
But what does it do.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
It's like a sub dial for the seconds and minutes
and hours I think, so that the top button will
be a start stop and the bottom is a reset.
So it did it function is like a stopwatch. But
I think they got their start with timing out shells
and when they exploded, if I'm not mistaken, not torpedoes, yeah,
(47:10):
I think, but again off the dome. So if I'm wrong,
all apologies you're saying.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Chronog 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 worship you know,
Mars or whatever. Yeah, that is where the word horoscope
came from. Horoscope means our marker.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Pretty nay huh, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Okay, nifty, I like it too, And since Chuck said
he likes it, that obviously means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
That's right, And we read this from Bill I guess
you 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 kind of get
the word out. Hey, guys, been listening for for ten
years since commuting from Erie to Pittsburgh for a new job,
you feel countless hours of boredom with education and smiles.
(48:08):
As my family and I now listen to your show
almost weekly, and my now almost eleven year old son
has grown up listening to you guys since shortly after
he was born.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
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 eleven year old
to come. We're loose with what he's allowed to listen to,
and don't try and shield him too much from the world.
Everything you put out is educational. For instance, the Operation
Mincemeat episode is one of our favorites. But there's anything
(48:41):
particularly mature, like murder stuff or like the Lizzie Bordon 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
(49:01):
because we don't do it on this show, but it's
still what do you call it, PGPG PG eleven Maybe.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
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 leap behind.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
I think in Scotland didn't that when family leave.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Yeah, I still don't understand that. We didn't say anything
even remotely offensive. Yeah, and I think they just didn't
like the sounds of our voices or something like that.
I don't maybe so, but I don't think it was
anything we said.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Okay, good.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
Well.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Content wise though, this one is super on the up
and up and kid appropriate. Nothing's scary at all, super pop, cultury, historical,
kind of interesting, but just maybe a curse word or two.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
Yeah, maybe a blue joke here there, but hopefully over
any kid's head.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
Yeah, that's what we like to do. It's confused children
so their parents get explain on the way.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
How 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 stuff youshould
know dot com and click on the on tour button
and it will show you all the places we're going
to be and if you click on those, it will
take you to go buy tickets so you can come
see us. This is the first time in years and years,
(50:22):
I guess, since we've been on the road so we're
kind of excited about coming back. Maybe a little rusty, yeah,
but that also usually means that those first couple shows
get some high flying high jinks.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
Yeah, I get ready Denver the Mile High City. How
appropriate's right?
Speaker 2 (50:37):
And if you want to get in touch with us,
like Bill right, yeh Bill did? Thanks for that email
Bill and we'll see you in Akron. You can email
us at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, just want to give a quick tour update
because we have three shows coming up very very soon
with plenty of great seats available.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Yeah. On January twenty seventh, twenty eighth, and twenty ninth,
we're going to be in your town's Denver, Seattle, and
San Francisco, and tickets are still available. You can go
to stuff youshould Know dot com, click on the on
tour button and you can click on get tickets and
it will take you to go get tickets and we
hope to see you guys soon.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
That's right. Denver, you're doing great. Seattle, we love you guys.
San Francisco, we love you guys. So come on out
and see us. How about that.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yeah, we'll see you guys very soon.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
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, do some talking about time keeping,
so that's what we're doing today.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah. Olivia helped us put this one together. I think
the charge was, Hey, how about something on the history
of time keeping? Mm hm 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 Goldilock zone, as they say.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Oh nice, nice astronomical cosmological reference there.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Well, I think that is a reference for a lot
of things, right, Nope, that Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Where'd you get this idea? Because this was when you
came up with.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
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 that call it hourglass, and
I was wondering about just hourglasses, and then I started
thinking about like just you know, the concept of time
(02:01):
and when people started keeping time, and I was kind
of had a hunch and I was right that, you know,
the need to keep time didn't come around til much later.
So like as we'll see, early timekeeping was more like
seasonal or astrological, and it didn't get to be a
thing like hey, I have an appointment at a certain
(02:22):
minute until much much later.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, but earlier than you'd think, or earlier than I thought.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
At least yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
So speaking of timekeeping, 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 amba or something like that.
But if you put like a stick in the ground,
(02:49):
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 anomon g nom n. I think
(03:10):
it means rod in Greek. Maybe I also saw that
it was slang in Greek for penis. No really, yeah,
and that just.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Just just like, hey, to check out the gnomon on
that guy.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah, almost exactly. If not that, but just said an
ancient Greek Oh okay, got cha hellenic. Yeah, but just
tracking the shadow that the gnomon cast, hopefully just a
stick in the ground. Yeah, that's that was early timekeeping.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Oh man, I have a thousand jokes. I'm just gonna
walk right past at this point.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Good for you. Buddy, you're a pro.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
I know growing up here it's fifty four. So that was, yeah,
that's what people use for the longest time, and that eventually,
as we'll see, would carry over to things like sundials.
But it's no surprise that China was way ahead of
the game as far as timekeeping goes, because the oldest
surviving sort of actual thing that we have comes from
(04:09):
northern China, from an archaeological site that they found dated
back to twenty three hundred 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.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
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 what this nomon And the other person's like, no,
don't pull that out, and they're like no, I mean
the stick.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Right, They said, you can get canceled for that, right.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
So if you're like, well that sounds a lot like
a sun dial, you're right. The thing that sticks up
for the sun dial is a no mon. There's another
version of it that's even earlier than the sun dial,
it seems from ancient Egypt, called the shadow clock. Yeah,
it's actually really hard to describe. It's much easier to
just go look up. But imagine a capital t laying
(05:06):
flat on its back on the ground and it's raised
its head and neck up to look at its feet.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
That's essentially that's kind of perfect. Actually, thank you.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
I really thought about that one for a while. I
have to admit. But the shadow that that crossbar the
top of the tea casts on the rest of the
tea 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 of the
sun is setting in the west. Pretty spectacular considering that's
(05:39):
close to three thousand years old.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Yeah, for sure for that descriptor to help you that
you were laying flat on your back with your neck
raised up looking at your feet.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
Yeah, nice work. Finally to the sun dial. The first
round sun dial that we kind of know as a
sun dial seems like it was created by a Greek
philosopher name annex Mander, very cool name, not Alexander, but
Annexmander of Malaitis. This was sixth century BC, but again
(06:19):
probably still tracking seasons at this point. The first sun
dials 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 be eventually much later we'll get to minutes. But
the hourly timekeeping started in three point fifty BCE.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yeah, and then very quickly after that, around two to
eighty BCE, they came up with the Hemi 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 Hemi cycle,
Because it turns out all you need is half a
(07:00):
ball to make a sun dial like that. And I
really do wonder if somebody built them like that, like
they'd make the one, split it in two and then
all of a sudden they had two hemicycles to sell.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
I bet you're getting really good at describing things at
this juncture in your career.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It took me long enough for almost two year eighteen.
It is. 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.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
By the way, quick correction because a listener just wrote
in about this, we're about to be at your nineteen
and completed your eighteen technically no really, yeah, because you're
nineteen and you're twenty are the are you know the
two next years? Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (07:52):
It does, But I feel like it's wrong because started
in April two thousand and eight and going to April
of twenty twenty six, eighteen years completed. I see, yeah,
I should have known right when somebody busted out mathis
it's just been like, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
The cool thing about the Hemi cycle, besides the fact
that people back then probably said, is that thing a
hemi 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,
(08:32):
but they accounted for that. They had sun dials that
would show the time using multiple arcs carved into the
hemisphere to account for that sun changing over the course
of the year.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
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 where you could tell what season it
was because it was within one of those arcs, or
two of those arcs, or three or four.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Right, Yeah, and you know I mentioned the seasonal hours
when Greek sun dials started dividing daytime into twelve equal parts.
Obviously not hours, because we eventually ended up at twenty
four 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, what
(09:22):
they will one day call an hour is 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.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah, And 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.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, except where just you know, modern humans are way
too anal to just let it kind of flow like
that still got to be exact, you.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Know, right, right, Okay, so you got the sun dial,
and everybody was like, well, we move around a lot
and not every place has a sun dial, 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 sun dials too, usually made of bronze,
(10:21):
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 Constantinople, or put
it in this setting if you're in Luxer, right, and
then other ones you kind of have to figure it
(10:42):
out a little more based on latitude. But they were
portable and essentially they were like pocket watches but amazing
bronze spheres sometimes.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Yeah, So, like once they could do that, they would
hang it facing the sun so that that little pointer
I guess it was still called a gnomon at this point, I.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Would think so. I think some people still call them
gnomons when they're referring to sun dials.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Yeah, it was like the staff of raw model.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
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.
(11:50):
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 out, but as
much water as you can within this you know, before
this beam of sunlight reaches this little line essentially, right.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Yeah, But in Rome they had an extra reason for it,
and that was because the hours of every single day,
or the first twelve hours of every single day, because
it wasn't initially that they were also like, let's track
the nighttime too. They just tracked from sunrise to sunset typically. Yeah,
each of those hours was associated with the different astrological sign.
(12:30):
It was called planetary hours, and it was because so
you could maximize whoever you were worshiping. So like if
you were worshiping Seline the moon goddess, you wanted to
do that three hours after sunrise on Monday, and so
you would use some sort of time keeping device to
keep track of that.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah, And the same, of course is true in Islam.
Once that became a big thing, the Muslims adopted sun
dials because they're you know, have to pray and at
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 sun dial in your garden, it's a little thing,
which we have one of those, about one for Emily
(13:10):
a few years ago. Cute. That kind of sun dial
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.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Yeah. They also laid trigonometry on the whole thing and
came up with a bunch of different kinds of sun dials.
There's one that was conical, and remember the Hemi cycle.
Imagine taking that and just kind of squishing the bowl
and adjusting it at an angle. That's what a conical
sun dial is. They look amazingly cool, So I say,
(13:46):
look one of those up.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
And then finally I think before we break, we should
give a shout out to early thirteenth century Moroccan mathematician
Abou al Hasan 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
(14:11):
real timekeeping, and that kind of spread out all over
the world from there.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Very nice. Yeah, all right, well let's take that break.
Then it's time.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
All right, we'll be right back up with Joe shoe
on Chow.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
Stop you shit, okay, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
So we're back, and before we move on, I want
to say that I finally got it. Reggie Watts.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Did you listen to it?
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, when I was qaing and I got it, and
I was like, man, that zuumed right past me.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Well you were in a thought and I slipped it
in there very stealthily.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
It was very great. All right, nice little treat for
we're talking about the National Radio Quiet Zone episode. By
the way, everybody, that's right, so you got sun dials.
Next thing that we moved on to is water. A
bunch of different cultures came up with water clocks. It's
not clear if again it started in China and moved
to Greece and then moved to the Muslim countries. Who knows,
(15:21):
But it's also possible that this that people came up
with us. 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 like almost our glasses made of water.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, I mean, 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.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Right, yeah, pretty much. I mean that's essentially it. And
you could supplement sun dials with these, because on a
sun dial, if it was really overcast, yeah, you had
no idea what time it was at night. These things
worked as well, though really there were two problems with them.
One was that they would freeze. If it was freezing water,
(16:16):
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
(16:39):
valves and siphons to regulate water more accurately.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Yeah, I wonder if there was ever like, sorry, I'm late,
you know, we had a cold snap. My water clock froze,
Like you got to move those things inside, buddy.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
I guarantee somebody use that excuse.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
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 tenth 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,
(17:17):
and it would ensure that you're on time to that appointment.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Yeah, and that engineer was Jiang si Jun.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Nay show off. I was just gonna walk right past that.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Here's my favorite kind of early Oh me too, is it? Yeah?
I surprised. Yeah, incense clocks.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, and I'm not even into incense anymore. I was
in college. I think, like most people.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Are same here. I used to burn some frank incense man.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
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 quickly does that
(18:05):
thing burn down and stop burning?
Speaker 2 (18:08):
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'd put
on top of the box to create different times. So
(18:28):
like if you wanted an hour, that 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.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
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 sense
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 and its simplicity,
(19:03):
and also like, you know, you know what happens at
sandal with time, sexiest time.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Yeah, I've got jokes that I'm keeping it myself.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Yeah good.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
There are 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'll wake you
up for sure every time. And apparently Chinese messengers would
take incense and light one end and put the other
in between their toes and wake themselves up like that,
(19:38):
which is man, just drink a bunch of water. That's
all you need to do. Don't burn your toes.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
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
twenty four.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
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 astrolabes.
I'm not even gonna try to really describe an astrolab Yeah, go.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Look those up.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
They are incredibly intricate mechanically. They were invented by Muslims
in I think the sixth century CE, so it's just
amazing that they were able to do this. And astrolabes
were used at c until the sexton came along about
a thousand years later. Essentially, that's how effective they were.
(20:44):
But you could navigate with them, you could survey with them.
You could also keep time with them because you just
adjust the astrolabe to mimic the stars or something like that,
and you can be like, oh, it's two thirty, it's
Sandalwood time.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
That's right, it's Sandalwood time. Then we finally get to
the hour glass. Yes, but later than you think, and
especially and I'm glad Livia 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
(21:17):
that hourglasses came along, and actually after the mechanical clock
that's nuts. The earliest known reference is in Italy in
thirteen thirty eight. And you think an hourglass is pretty
easy to make, like, you know, you just blow the
glass in a certain way and throw the sand in there.
But sanda spinicky as you know, as far as humidity
(21:37):
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 hourglass than you might imagine.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Yeah, when it's humid out, the soap opera Days of
Our Lives never get started, right, It's sad.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Was that the one you watched in college?
Speaker 2 (21:59):
I think that's what people wrote in and said, yeah, I'm.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
Pretty sure I couldn't remember.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
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 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
(22:25):
did some really neat stuff with say like water clocks.
One was a guy named Andre Nkos. 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 fifteen meters or about forty five feet tall,
still standing, but when it was in use, it had
(22:47):
water clocks that had sundials, you could gauge the wind,
you could tell what was going on celestially. He just
basically packed every Niedo timekeeping invention that was around at
the time end of this thing.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
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 his colleagues, 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. Yeah, and it did a single rotation
(23:24):
every twenty four hours, which you think, like, all right,
that just sounds sort of regular. But it also had
like bells chiming on the hour, and I had a
drumbeat 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.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
It went but in every fifteen that's right. There's a
guy named Sousung who is very famous for his thirty
five foot I also saw it described as forty 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
(24:02):
eleventh century, so it's 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.
(24:22):
He was from Upper Mestamia, 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
(24:43):
of it at 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 there play
symbols and stuff. It's just amazing, especially when you learn
(25:05):
about how every single step works.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Yeah that thing you sent that to me, that was
super cool looking. Yeah, very ornate. Now we kind of
get to the point, shall we break her? Can we
keep going?
Speaker 2 (25:17):
Yeah, let's take a break, all right.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
We'll be right back up with Joe shoe on cho.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Stuff is shit.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
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
(26:02):
were their 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 it. Would it be Gerbert? I think so,
(26:24):
Gerbert of Arlac, who was a French scholar, but you
might know him a little better as Pope Sylvester the Second. Oh, okay,
because he would become pope later on. He developed I
guess in his pre pope days a mechanical type timekeeping device,
like truly mechanical in nine ninety six CE. But then
(26:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
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
(27:13):
the original mechanical It's like the Chinese came up with
this a very long time ago. When Europe got involved,
they removed water to run gears and replace 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 gonna pull it toward the Earth and
(27:33):
it's releasing kinetic energy. If you can control its descent,
you can use that to turn gears into keep track
of time in a very specific way. I mean, it's
not nearly as accurate as anything we tracked time with today,
but it was still pretty impressive that they were making
these in like the thirteenth century.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, for sure. There was a monk in twelve seventy
one named Robertus 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
(28:15):
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 and a grandfather clock,
but it's weights that are still operating this thing.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, and one of the inventions that really kind of
it was a game changer. It's called the virgin foliot mechanism. Essentially,
you remember in Karate Kid two where all of those
okay now and villagers are sitting there playing their hand drums. Yeah, yeah, okay,
So that's essentially a virgin of foliot kind of imagine
(28:54):
the drum part is the I think foliot, 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 folliot, and the folliot turns
like slowly one way and then slowly back another and
when it moves back in position, the gear is allowed
(29:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Yeah. And the but you wouldn't it doesn't move like
an Oknawan hand drum moves. I mean, it moves not
as fast, I should say, be out of control clock.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yeah. Didn't that drum move faster faster the more intense
that the scenes got in that movie?
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Hmm, yeah, oh yeah, Man, it really helped build the
suspense I think during the main fight maybe.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Yeah. I mean, this is a pretty smart device for
a movie.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah. And one of the great bad movies of all time.
And I'm lobbying to get on a friend of the
show The Flophouse, the best bad movie podcast out there
in my opinion, to do Karate Kid three, which is
hugely entertaining as a bad movie.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Is that even worse than Jaden Smith's Karate Kid, because
I heard that was pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
I didn't see it. But Karate Kid three, oh man,
if you're into a fun bad movie to watch with people,
Karate Kid three is one. And that was one where
I thought I talked about on the show at some point,
but where God, Ruby was probably like six years old
and came up with, like, legit, her first quality joke
watching that movie.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Can you share it?
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (31:06):
I don't know if it would translate. I'll tell you later.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Okay, that's fine, Yeah, but good for her. Six is
a good age to come up with a quality joke by.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
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 a 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 Miagi in a forest,
(31:36):
and Ruby said, that'd be funny if they reached over
to a tree and turned the moon off.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
That's good. That is a quality joke.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
That's a pretty good joke.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Yep. Yeah, yeah, I haven't seen the karate Kid three.
I know of it. I know Hillary Swank's the karate
kid in that one.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
No, no, no, no, no. Uh, well, maybe I'm getting the
number wrong. Karate Kid three was actually Daniel and Miagi 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.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Well, I haven't seen the one you're talking about either.
I don't remember anybody turning off any lights anywhere.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, it's truly bad in a great way.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Okay, So just back to Just like in the Muslim world,
time keeping 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,
(32:39):
using the virgin folio mechanism and weights, they helped keep
the monks on track. Yeah, 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,
(32:59):
is because 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 there coming and
descending from a very high place.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, for sure, nice little factoid there.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I love that one.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
And the oldest surviving mechanical clock is in a church.
It was built for this Salisbury Cathedral that was in
thirteen eighty six. 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 close?
Speaker 2 (33:39):
I guess like that glass thing dome you put over stuff.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
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 sun dial 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. Yeah, And they went, not that hard, we
can do that.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
They're like, are you talking about a moving gnomon? And
the monk 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 the clocks started tracking time in monasteries and
then churches in the cities that were built around churches
would all hear the bell, so people knew what time
(34:24):
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 nineteen thirties,
(34:44):
and he says that that is the birth of the
modern era, not steam power that came hundreds of years later. Right,
removing 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 shop at
(35:05):
three or else you're fired. You know, that would a
draft exactly. I think that's a really good case that
he makes.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah, no, totally. I mean it was a real game changer,
and that's when everyone got a little bit more uptight, I imagine.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
I imagine as well.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
You know, 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 meant, it didn't even
come around until the late fourteenth century. So minutes are
a relatively modern thing if you consider fourteenth century modern.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Right, and thanks for letting me take that, Lewis mum
for little tidbit.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Well, yeah, did you like that one?
Speaker 2 (35:52):
I love it. It's almost as good as the the
different smells of incense.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Yeah, well, you know, we like to scratch each other's back.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
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 yeah,
(36:27):
replacing the weights in clocks with coiled springs meant they
became portable because of course humans love to make things portable.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Yeah, but they were still pretty inexact because friction is
a thing, So depending on how well it's made, how
well it was lubricated, if it was hot, if it
was humid, that 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
(36:56):
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 Galilee and the turn
of the seventeenth 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
(37:17):
a cord using his own pulse beat as a reference.
Pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Yeah, So he found like you can use a pendulum
to keep time. The reason why, as 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,
(37:43):
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 the clock. He never built it
because he kept being called a way by the Indigo
girls to help them get through life, so he was
(38:04):
unable to build it. His son started to build it,
but as Galileo always said, that boy never finished anything
that he started, so he didn't complete it. And finally,
in sixteen fifty six, the Dutch mathematician Christian Hugens, the
son Galileo always wanted, he ended up creating that clock,
the first pendulum clock that Galileo had kind of come
(38:27):
up with.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Yeah, that was in sixteen fifty six. And almost right
after that there was an English scientist named Robert Hook
with an e of the end, said you know what,
I could make that thing better, and he replaced the
verge with you know that we mentioned earlier, with a
something called an anchor escapement, which was just a new
mechanism to regulate the swing I guess, but that allowed
(38:51):
the arc of the pendulum to be reduced from about
one hundred I'm sorry, one hundred degree swing to four
to six degrees, which again meant you could pack it
in a packageable size.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
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
(39:22):
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 sixteen eighty came up with
what we now call grandfather clocks. And because of everything
(39:45):
that kind of developed from Galileo on, Clement 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.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
That's right, And of course you're referring to the long
case clock. It didn't get the name grandfather clock until
eighteen twenty I'm sorry, eighteen seventy six. And that's actually
from a song called My Grandfather's Clock. 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 it quit working when he died, and
(40:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
You know, that's a redux of our first short stuff.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
I thought we had talked about that, right, that was
the very first, the very first one.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
Huh yeah, grandfather clocks man, so pendulum clocks. Everyone said,
this is great. I love these long case slash grandfather clocks.
But finally, in the twenties people had figured out, I
guess centuries before, in the nineteenth century, a century before
that you could keep tying with a crystal. They produced
(41:03):
reliable oscillations that you could track for time, and people
figured out how to use that and watches for that.
I would say, go listen to our atomic clock episode.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Yeah, that was a good one.
Speaker 2 (41:14):
Out From crystal quartz came atomic clocks, and from atomic
clocks came things like GPS. It's how your iPhone or
you know, 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 pendulums to
(41:37):
crystals to atoms.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
That's right. And by the way, I bet I made
that same dumb Henry Clay joke and that short stuff didn't.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
Of course, for those of you who don't know, Henry
Clay People was a great band and friends of the
show whom are a good Joey and Andy Ciarra, the brothers,
musical brothers, screenwriting brothers, and they did the theme song
to the Stuff You Should Know TV show.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
That's right. It was a great theme, very catchy, and.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
They're still a great friends. I see Joey all the
time because he lives in New York now and Andy's
still in LA.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
That's awesome. Shout out.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
That's right. So we're back or not, we're back. We're
all of a sudden headed toward Watches. Everyone mm hm,
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 fifteenth century,
eventually involved to wearable clocks like flava flave, and then
(42:41):
then eventually we got to watch us. By the sixteenth century,
of course, we were 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
(43:02):
were the Countess of Hungary in eighteen sixty.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Eight, yeah, or one of Emperor Wilhelm the Second German
naval officers in eighteen eighty, because before that watches were
women's jewelry, that's what they were considered. Wilhelm the Second
said nine, now it's going to be a military gear. Yeah.
And from World War One, which came a little later,
(43:27):
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 as starting around the twenties
fashionable in the United States, and I think great Britain
and in the twenties 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
(43:51):
of started to build very quickly starting in the twenties.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
Yeah, and you know a lot of this stuff that
you a lot of features that you have on a
watch if you're 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.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
Yeah, stop watch, No, stop.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Watch just like on a regular wristwatch. There's a name
for it. I mean I have one of them. I
just can't think of it right now.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
But it's for a stopwatch function though, right.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Well yeah, essentially, but as it pertains to the regular time.
But that was essentially, I think initially to keep track
of like when you would launch a not a missile,
like the kind of bomb you drop in a tube
and it shoots somewhere torpedo. Sure, No, Like you know
when you drop it in a tube and it shoots
(44:49):
up in the air. 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
in calculat Oh smart, I think that's the deal. I
hope I'm not wrong. Someone will correct me.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Well, what about water resistance?
Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yeah, I mean 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 nineteen
twenty six, and then in the nineteen fifties that's when
stop watch functions, although that was around during the war,
So I'm not sure the difference between what I was
(45:29):
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 not for real watch people
they have like dozens and hundreds, but I have one
called a loom Tech and that is the most luminescent
(45:53):
that you can get, I think, And that thing is
so bright and cool. I just love it.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Does it leave like floaters on your vision after you
look at it?
Speaker 1 (46:01):
No, But if it's like fully charging go into a
dark closet or something, it's like, it's super bright green
and it's awesome. I love it.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
So you can really time out your spin the bottle?
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Oh you know it, because I don't want to be
in that closet for me any longer than I have
to be.
Speaker 2 (46:17):
I was raised baptism, making awkward conversation, Yeah, totally. So
if you are like I want to hear more about
watches ts, We're pretty much at the end of the episode,
but I would recommend going and listening to our watch
episode because we talked a lot about the transition from
mechanical watches to digital watches in that episode. If I
(46:41):
remember correctly, it's pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Yeah, for sure. Chronographs that's what I'm talking about with
the watches, by the way.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
But what does it do.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
It's like a sub dial for the seconds and minutes
and hours I think, so that the top button will
be a start stop and the bottom is a reset.
So it did it function is like a stopwatch. But
I think they got their start with timing out shells
and when they exploded, if I'm not mistaken, not torpedoes, yeah,
(47:10):
I think, but again off the dome. So if I'm wrong,
all apologies you're saying.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Chronog 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 worship you know,
Mars or whatever. Yeah, that is where the word horoscope
came from. Horoscope means our marker.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Pretty nay huh, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
Okay, nifty, I like it too, And since Chuck said
he likes it, that obviously means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
That's right, And we read this from Bill I guess
you 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 kind of get
the word out. Hey, guys, been listening for for ten
years since commuting from Erie to Pittsburgh for a new job,
you feel countless hours of boredom with education and smiles.
(48:08):
As my family and I now listen to your show
almost weekly, and my now almost eleven year old son
has grown up listening to you guys since shortly after
he was born.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
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 eleven year old
to come. We're loose with what he's allowed to listen to,
and don't try and shield him too much from the world.
Everything you put out is educational. For instance, the Operation
Mincemeat episode is one of our favorites. But there's anything
(48:41):
particularly mature, like murder stuff or like the Lizzie Bordon 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
(49:01):
because we don't do it on this show, but it's
still what do you call it, PGPG PG eleven Maybe.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
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 leap behind.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
I think in Scotland didn't that when family leave.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Yeah, I still don't understand that. We didn't say anything
even remotely offensive. Yeah, and I think they just didn't
like the sounds of our voices or something like that.
I don't maybe so, but I don't think it was
anything we said.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Okay, good.
Speaker 3 (49:38):
Well.
Speaker 1 (49:38):
Content wise though, this one is super on the up
and up and kid appropriate. Nothing's scary at all, super pop, cultury, historical,
kind of interesting, but just maybe a curse word or two.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
Yeah, maybe a blue joke here there, but hopefully over
any kid's head.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
Yeah, that's what we like to do. It's confused children
so their parents get explain on the way.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
How 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 stuff youshould
know dot com and click on the on tour button
and it will show you all the places we're going
to be and if you click on those, it will
take you to go buy tickets so you can come
see us. This is the first time in years and years,
(50:22):
I guess, since we've been on the road so we're
kind of excited about coming back. Maybe a little rusty, yeah,
but that also usually means that those first couple shows
get some high flying high jinks.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
Yeah, I get ready Denver the Mile High City. How
appropriate's right?
Speaker 2 (50:37):
And if you want to get in touch with us,
like Bill right, yeh Bill did? Thanks for that email
Bill and we'll see you in Akron. You can email
us at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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