Once Upon a Time...

But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day. ~Benjamin Disraeli

The history of time is an interesting story. Many of us are familiar with sundials and the apocalyptic Mayan calendar, but how much do we know about the history of telling time?

Anciently, civilizations relied on the movement of the planets and the stars to determine seasons, months, and years.

· Over 20,000 years ago, ice-age hunters would scratch lines and make holes in sticks and bones, counting the days between the phases of the moon.

· Some five thousand years ago, Sumerians in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley created a calendar, dividing the year into 30-day months, divided the day into 12 periods, and these periods into 30 parts.

· The Egyptians created a calendar based on the cycles of the moon. Later they realized the “Dog Star”, or Sirius, rose next to the sun every 365 days when the Nile would annually flood. From this, they derived a 365 day calendar around the year 3100 BCE.

· During the reign of the Mayans between 2600 BCE and 1500 BCE, they devised a 260 day calendar relying on the movement of Venus and a 365 day calendar relying on the movement of the sun and moon. Later, these calendars became portions of Aztec calendar stones, which we know today as the one that predicts the end of the world.

In addition to calendars, clocks have a long history. Next to the Sumerians, the Egyptians were the first to divide their days into periods like hours.

· An obelisk, used as early as 3500 BC, was a kind of sundial, creating shadows on the ground according to what time of day it was. 2000 years later, the Egyptians created a portable shadow clock or sundial which divided up the day into 10 parts with two “twilight hours” each morning and evening.

· In the quest for better year-round accuracy, sundials evolved from flat horizontal or vertical plates to more elaborate forms. By 30 BCE, Vitruvius could describe 13 different sundial styles in use in Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy.

· Clepsyda, or water clocks, used as early as 1500 BCE were not based on the observation of the skies. These devices counted time based on the constant drip of water. The relationship between the water level and the markings indicated the time.

· Although both sundials and water clocks evolved, the mechanical clock did not develop until the 14^th century. Christiaan Huygens created the first accurate mechanical clock as the first pendulum clock in 1656. This evolved into digital watches, which used electrical currents running through quartz crystals to cause vibration and tell the time very accurately.

· In 1967, the atomic clock was created and still stands as the most accurate timekeeping method.

But you might be thinking what does all this have to do with modern-day times? In an article in The British Journal for the History of Science, authors Carlene Stephens and Maggie Dennis commented “Historically, clocks and watches of all sorts lie at an important crossroads of science, technology, and society. Changes in timekeeping technology have influenced the character of scientific observation, aided the development of other machine technologies and brought significant revisions in the way people think about and behave in time. In contributing to the creation of time discipline and the abandonment of temporal cues from the natural world, the invention of the mechanical clock around AD 1300, for example, was one of the key points in turning Western civilization towards modernity.”

The way we tell time is directly related to the way we value time. If we only recognize the sunrise and sunset, then our concept of time moves much slower than if we analyze the .16 seconds it takes to search something on Google. Time is linked directly to our perspective. Through the measure of time, we measure our success. Even now as we’ve divided up time into our arbitrary hours and minutes, as we’ve tried to become its master, time is still fleeting; it slips away from us. We can’t touch it or taste it, but we can feel it. We’ve tried to control it and categorize it, but it can’t be contained in a watch or a calendar. We can decide how to use time, but ultimately we must surrender to its ongoing beat.

Denis Waitley put it this way: “Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can't buy more hours. Scientists can't invent new minutes. And you can't save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow”.

So how will we use our time? Will we kill time? Keep time with the music? Have the time of our lives? Take it one day at a time? Only time will tell.