Time!

Hey guys, it's Adventure Van with a blog about Time, and how we record it. We've used the sun for a long time, from just looking at it to sundials, and we've invented complex machines that were huge to do it before being able to just have to look at a clock installed on your electronic device or watch. One of the reasons we have such an accurate system is because of 1967, when we changed the definition of time from Solar to Atomic. But what led up to that point? What happened before? What happened after? What started us to care about what time it is more then Morning and Evening? Find out on this blogpost.

Now, we've always had an attention to time, using sundials as top of the art ways to tell what time it was for hundreds of years. But in 1583, something diffrent happened to the way we tell time today. Thanks to a person named Galileo Galilei, whom you may not know, being bored at church and needing to be distracted came across a extremely important discovery. As a teen in that era, it was extremely uncommon to NOT go to church, so he went to do church-like things, but noticed something. Behind the priest, one of the altar lamps was swinging. He noticed that it seemed to not change the amount of time it took to get from one side to the lowest point, even though the swings were getting smaller and smaller.

He used this idea 20 years later, building a machine, a 'pendulum', to work with the study of dynamics. He discovered that the weight or mass of the ball and the arc of the swing didn't change how it swung, but the length of the string. As he wrote to a colleague, "The marvelous property of the pendulum, ... is that it makes all vibrations, large or small, in equal times." Now, you see, the thing about it being 1603 when this was discovered meant that for the 'time' (ha), being able to keep such exact timings was unheard of. Yet Galileo discovered this sneaky way to find the correct time, being within 16 seconds of the correct time sometimes. There was just one problem.

Remember my blog about Cold? In that blog, I discussed how Fredrick Tudor had no official market for bringing ice down into the equator area. The same can be said here, as there really was no need to be exact to the second. But the opportunity opened itself in the sea. As Columbus had discovered the Americas, there was a sudden boom in trading being done with ships with all these cool new things. However, there was a problem. Longitude then depended on knowing the port clock and the ship clock, and reseting the ship clock to match the current time.

The problem with this was in the port clock, as it could be off by as much as 20 minutes a day, making just 3 days at sea let the clock go off by an hour. Anyone who figured out how to do a way to tell the exact time without constant stops and resets would be rich for life. So, a old man named Galileo figured out that the machine he made that kept 'equal times' would be perfect for such a thing. By then 58 years old, the pendulum was gathering dust in his mind. But it was perfect for this, and after introducing it to the crews, the ports realized that their times were off and changed to the pendulum clock. The cities near the ports were forced to change in order to keep up constant trade, and so it spread.

However, was stopped us from forever using 'grandfather' clocks? I mean, we were able to keep correct times, meaning that farmers who worked from dusk to dawn now could work from 6:00am to 7:00pm. We could have precise meetings, keeping our schedule small and slim to do things we'd have to wait an hour for in the past. So why did we realize again how off this clock system was? One thing we can thank is the idea that you shouldn't have to glance at a clock tower to find out what time it was. What if it was small, concise, and could literally be watched on your wrist? Yup, the idea to be able to keep time anywhere was one of the reason we had to upgrade out of pendulums and into spring-loaded gear systems.

Now, you might think that the next step would be the now used Atomic Time. But did you know about Quartz time? The rock Quarts when examined moves very slightly by expanding and contracting 'in equal times', to speak in Galileo's words. It could measure down to the thousandths of a second, and was only changed by one or two of those a day. It also wasn't effected by humidity or movement as pendulum and gear systems were, and was entirely automatic. We also got upgraded Quartz Watches because of this, which were really cool on their own. But being able to keep a small time keeper that's completely accurate even at the size of a pinhead? That opened a special door, the computer one, as it was necessary in microprocessors, which turned the huge, bulky, gigantic computers, (along with other things), into medium sized computers with only 1 by 2 feet difference.

But what about Atomic Time? It was invented when things extremely high tech, like the railroads in japan, or the dreaded Wall Street, needed to be correct to the millisecond or they'd break, crash, or be deadly in the cases of trains and hospital equipment. We really needed to figure out a way to be super accurate. So we combined a newly discovered thing, the 'Atom', in 1950, and began measuring how fast it moved. And, weirdly, it moved in time, but it wasn't 'human eye' time, it was nanosecond time, which over a million passed in reading that word. Since now we could keep our errors down to that level of smallness, we could be accurate way over the millisecond, which is the reason why computers, phones, trains, radios, air travel, heck, even high-frequency trading for Wall Street was now possible.

All in All, our love of keeping good watch of time advanced us as a civilization, and in turn it advanced us as well.

That's Adventure Van, Keeping Time.