Humans and Time Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Humans and Time Paper - Essay Example hose days.   The night was divided up into twelve hours, which were designated by the position of stars in the sky.   The day was divided into ten hours and a shadow clock was used to keep track of these hours.   The twilight hours were the hours before dawn and after sunset. After a while, the Egyptians and other ancient societies realized that the sun rose and set in different places in the summer and winter. In fact, the sun never took the same course on any one day throughout the year and also if the sky is overcast throughout the whole day and night this method would not work. (Barnett, 1998) The major fault with sundials and shadow clocks is obvious so, around 1400 B.C. water clocks were invented named clepsydra. A water clock was made of two containers of water, one higher than the other. Water traveled from the higher container to the lower container through a tube connecting the containers. The containers had marks showing the water level, and the marks told the time. Water clocks worked better than sundials because they told the time at night as well as during the day. But it also had its own limitations like Water would flow more slowly or quickly when the temperature changed. The first mechanical clocks appeared in Europe, supposedly because of inspiration by the stories that came from China about mechanical clocks. The first mechanical clocks were rather simple and just sounded a bell every hour.   The first mechanical clocks had a weight that would slowly lower, moving gears which moved a hand which showed the hour.   They could only be built in tall towers because the weights needed to fall a great distance or else the clocks would only work for a short amount of time. (ThinkQuest, n.d) Galileo made an amazing contribution to the world of time. Galileo had noticed that the pendulums period of swing appeared to be independent of the extent of the arc of the swing and recognized its potential for timekeeping, but died before his work could be