|
RELATED LINKS:
The United States is not the only country that measures things
by feet, gallons, pounds, and degrees Fahrenheit.
To
demonstrate how out-of-date the U.S. is from basically everyone else in the world, it is pointed out by scientists and metricians
that we still use the archaic English system. It may be true, but we are not the only ones. Liberia uses the same system
which is not a surprise considering that the country was started by former American slaves who named their capital after American president James Monroe and it was only recently that Liberia’s president was not
a descendent of the original American emigrants. And there is a third country that uses the system – Myanmar (pictured
above). As a former British colony, they of course adopted the English system. After gaining their independence, the country
changed its name from Burma but not how it measured things.
Copyright
©2010, Listverse. All rights reserved.
PAGE CONTENTS:
Units of Measurement
Time
History of Clocks
Watches
Units of Measurement
Why
do we measure it that way?
Some very common measurements have very arbitrary
beginnings, showing that it's merely standardization that makes them work.
- Foot - The length of Charlemagne's foot, modified
in 1305 to be 36 barleycorns laid end to end.
- Inch - The width across the knuckle on King Edgar's
thumb or, obviously, 3 barleycorns.
- Yard - The reach from King Henry I's nose to his
royal fingertips, a distance also twice as long as a cubit.
- Cubit - The length of the arm from elbow to fingertip.
- Mile - One thousand double steps of a Roman legionary.
Later Queen Bess added more feet so that the mile would equal eight furlongs.
- Furlong - The length of a furrow a team of oxen
could plow before resting.
- Acre - The amount of land a yoke of oxen would
plow in one day.
- Fathom - The span of a seaman's outstretched arms;
880 fathoms make a mile. The metric uses the meter, defined precisely as 1,650, 763.73 wavelengths of orange-red light emitted
by the krypton-86 atom, or originally one-ten-millionth the length of the longitude from the North Pole to the equator. The
meter is exactly 39.37 inches - or some 118 barleycorns.
The term mile comes from the Latin word
mille- meaning 1000. To the Romans it was the distance a soldier could cover in 1000 paces- about 5000 feet. But the British
farmers measured their fields in furlongs, which were 660 feet long, and they didn't want to change. So when the mile was
introduced in England, it was chnaged to 5280 feet - exactly 8 furlongs.
Makeshift
measures
When you don't have a measuring stick or tape handy,
use whatever's around. To the following list, add any other items that you always have handy.
- Credit card - 3 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches
- Business card - 3 1/2 x 2 inches
- Dollar bill - 6 1/8 x 2 5/8 inches
- Quarter (diameter) - 1 inch
- Penny (diameter) - 3/4 inch
- Ballpoint pen - 5 1/2 inches
- Videotape cassette - 7 3/4 x 4 inches
WHO CAME UP WITH THE INCH?
It was King Edward II of England
(1324) who decreed the inch to be equal to three barleycorns end to end.
HOW
MANY SQUARE INCHES ARE THERE IN AN ACRE?
6,272,640. It's the number of square feet in an acre
(43,560) times the number of square inches in a square foot (144).
TIME
A chronometer is a watch or clock whose movement has been tested and
certified to operate within a certain standard of accuracy.
The first battery-powered watch, the Hamilton Electric
500, was released in 1957 by the Hamilton Watch Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
This word still used in French
for large clocks. It is derived from the Greek 'hora' meaning hour and 'legein' meaning to tell.
Not all time zones are in one hour increments. Some countries use
30 minute offsets. When the time in Greenwich is 12:00 noon, it is 8:30am in Newfoundland and 9:30pm in Australia. In Nepal,
however, they use a time offset in quarter hours, so the time there would be 5:45pm.
A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of
a second!? (Source: Useless Trivia)
|
Clocks With Hands
The first known mechanical clocks in Europe were
built in the thirteenth century, but they did not have a circular dial or pointers to show the time. These primitive timekeepers
had bells or other noisemakers that sounded approximately once every hour.
The first clocks with pointers (hands) were made
in the fourteenth century. Those early dial clocks had only one hand, the hour hand. The idea of measuring time more accurately
than that was ridiculous in those days, because the clocks were not accurate enough to make it worthwhile.
Although Jost Burgi invented the first clock with
a minute hand in 1577, it was not until the invention of the pendulum-regulated clock in 1657 that a minute hand became practical,
and second hands were not used until the eighteenth century. |
How many pointers, or "hands,"
were there on the first clocks?
Some of the earliest clocks as we know them were
actually made in the fourteenth century. There was only one pointer, the hour hand, on the first clocks made in the fourteenth
century. But you might find yourself late for an appointment if you used
one today, as they had only a single hand. Minute and second hands weren't added until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
How long was an hour in the ancient
world?
The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians divided
the day into 24 hours, but their hours were not all the same length.
The day was divided into ten hours of light, two
hours of twilight, and twelve hours of darkness. The timing of the hours in a given day depended on the position of the sun,
so the hours' lengths changed with the seasons. It was not until the invention of mechanical clocks in the late Middle Ages
that the hours were set to identical lengths.
Most of the earliest clocks used a moving shadow
to indicate the passage of time. As early as 3500 BC, there were tall, thin stone obelisks whose shadows crossed the surface
of a flat plaza over the course of the day. Those, and later sundials, were marked with varying scales of hours for the different
seasons. A related device called the Merkhet was developed in Egypt around 600 BC to tell time at night by measuring the movements
of stars.
WHY IS AN HOUR DIVIDED INTO 60 MINUTES? WHY NOT 10 OR 100 MINUTES?
Because it is based on the sexagesimal system of
notation - a system based on the number 60 that predates the decimal system. It was developed about 2400 B.C. by the Sumerians.
Since ancient times, the sexagesimal system has been used to divide circles into 360 degrees (60 x 6), each degree into 60
minutes, each minute into 60 seconds. Because clocks have round faces, it seemed sensible to apply the system to the measurement
of time.
How is a second defined?
You might just think of it as the time it takes the
second hand of your watch to go from one mark to the next, of the period between the numbers change on your digital chronometer.
But to those who make the rules, a second is defined as being 9,192,631,770 times the time it takes for a cesium-133 atom
to swap hyperfine levels in its ground state.
WHERE IN THE UNITED STATES AND ITS
TERRITORIES, IS DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME NOT OBSERVED?
Daylight Saving Time, for the U.S. and its territories,
is not observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Eastern Time Zone portion of the State
of Indiana, and the state of Arizona (not the Navajo Indian Reservation, which
does observe). Navajo Nation participates in the Daylight Saving Time policy, due to its large size and location in three
states.
WHO CONCEIVED OF THE IDEA OF DAYLIGHT
SAVING TIME?
The idea of Daylight Saving Time was first conceived
by Benjamin Franklin during his sojourn as an American delegate in Paris in 1784, in an essay, "An Economical Project." Although
Franklin suggested it, it was first adopted in 1916 during World War I, in several countries in Europe, although it was proposed
several times before, but rejected.
History of Clocks
by Mary Bellis
Clocks are instruments that measure and show time.
The History of Timekeeping
Learn about the history of ancient timekeeping, sun and water clocks,
mechanical and quartz clocks, time standards and time zones with this indepth five page article.
Minute Hand
In 1577, Jost Burgi invented the minute hand. Burgi's invention was part
of a clock made for Tycho Brahe, an astronomer who needed an accurate clock for his stargazing.
Pendulum
In 1656, the pendulum was invented by Christian Huygens, making
clocks more accurate.
Wrist Watch
In 1504, the first portable (but not very accurate) timepiece was invented
in Nuremberg, Germany by Peter Henlein. The first reported person to actually wear a watch on the wrist was the French mathematician
and philosopher, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). With a piece of string, he attached his pocket watch to his wrist.
Quartz
According to the Smithsonian "In 1927, Canadian-born Warren Marrison,
a telecommunications engineer, was searching for reliable frequency standards at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Building on
earlier work in piezoelectricity, he developed a very large, highly accurate clock based on the regular vibrations of a quartz
crystal in an electrical circuit" - the first quartz clock.
Origins of "Clock"
The word 'clock' comes from the French word "cloche" meaning bell. The
Latin for bell is glocio, the Saxon is clugga and the German is glocke.
Standard Time
Sir Sanford Fleming invented standard time in 1878.
Alarm Clocks
An early prototype of the alarm clock was invented by the Greeks around
250 BC. The Greeks built a water clock where the raising waters would both keep time and eventually hit a mechanical bird
that triggered an alarming whistle.
The first mechanical alarm clock was invented by Levi Hutchins of Concord,
New Hampshire, in 1787. However, the ringing bell alarm on his clock could ring only at 4 am. On October 24, 1876 a mechanical
wind-up alarm clock that could be set for any time was patented (#183,725) by Seth E Thomas.
Self-winding Watch
Swiss John Harwood invented the self-winding watch in 1923.
Clock Companies
In 1908, the Westclox Clock Company is issued a patent for the Big Ben
alarm clock. The outstanding feature on this clock is the bell-back, which completely envelops the inner case back and is
an integral part of the case. The bell-back provides a loud alarm.
The Warren Clock Company was formed in 1912 by Mr. Henry Warren as President.
The company started by producing a new type of clock run by batteries, prior to that, clocks were either wound or run by weights.
©2007 About, Inc., A part of The New York Times ompany. All rights
reserved.
Watches
A chronometer is a watch or clock whose movement has been
tested and certified to operate within a certain standard of accuracy.
The first battery-powered watch, the Hamilton
Electric 500, was released in 1957 by the Hamilton Watch Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
This word still used
in French for large clocks. It is derived from the Greek 'hora' meaning hour and 'legein' meaning to tell.
|
