When time became regular and universal, it changed history
aeon.co
aeon.co
When clocks were developed the hour length became fixed, and the modern invention of the divisions of minute ("tiny") and ultimately second ("even more tiny") became first feasible and then, as the Industrial Revolution progressed, became useful. I've always assumed we had RPM and not RPS because of this, although very slow rotations would be easier to work with with a more find-grained denominator.
The one that was more surprising to me is the etymology of "seconds". They're called seconds because they're the second division of an hour (the first being minutes).
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second#Trivia
One natural way of adapting this into English would be "terce" (like the religious service), although I guess we could also just call it a "third" -- about 17 milliseconds.
According to some stuff I was reading last week, this is just about the smallest time interval that a human being can learn to notice in many contexts, or just about the smallest timing accuracy with which a person can learn to react to an anticipated event. For example, it's about the timing accuracy needed for a frame-perfect action in a NES speedrun. So there is a human use for such a small time interval!
(In the UK the mains frequency is 50Hz, as is the standard TV refresh rate)
I wonder if people involved with early film and video had a lot of 60:1 gearing available because of clocks or something (or just thought it was a very intuitive division to use).
... except in Japan! Japan imported Western mechanical clock, and modified it to display unequal hours. More on this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock.
For those who also find this stuff fun, I’m reading and highly recommend “When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation” by Paula Fredriksen [1], about the very early Christians.
I find it a vivid and history-backed picture of those times. It’s hard to appreciate just how apocalyptic the first believers were, and how the continued failure of the end-times to come would change the messaging and focus of the religion over the first few generations.
This system was also used more broadly in Japan, where the "Era" name (元号) would change after a momentous event, typically a few years apart but occasionally in rapid succession. Since Meiji they only change with the Emperors, as just happened last week.
In countries like the UK, laws are still numbered using the year of the reign of the monarch.
The process described in the article makes me think of the modern transition of land (property) being the spaces between the roads rather than roads being something that runs through land. The latter sort of remains in Japan as well, where ordinary roads are typically not given names.
> By the 16th century, European cities were so well synchronized that Rabelais could state “a city without bells is like a blind man without a stick.” The clock and the bells it chimed synchronized the relations among men.
> Clock time is a fungible measure of sacrifice. Of all measurement instruments, the clock is the most valuable because so many of the things we sacrifice to create are not fungible. The massive clock towers of Europe, with their enormous loud and resonant bells, broadcasting time fairly across the town and even the countryside, rather than the last relics of the medieval, were the first building block of the wealthy modern world.
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CD...