Time is still being explored by scientists: our perception of time and the effects of time. People have always tried to measure time, capture time, and make more of the stuff.
The article below comes from a newspaper article published in 1883. It is not an in-depth report, but it does touch on some historical measurements of time.
Time
Human ingenuity cannot make time. It can only invent methods if measuring the hours and minutes as they pass. When the earth was young, shadows cast by sunbeams noted the passing hours. From these sprang the sun dial, which answered while the sun shone, but failed while the sky was cloudy. Then water clocks, or clepsydrae, as they are technically know, came into use. By these, Athenian orators were wont to time their speeches two thousand years ago. After the water clock came the hour glass of running sand, and for three hundred years this was the common method of measuring time. Even fifty years ago it was employed in churches to inform “the elder” when he had preached enough. Meantime, various rude forms of clocks had been constructed, but none of much use. Not until the invention of the pendulum in the middle of the seventeenth century, and its application to clocks, did they become reliable. The clocks and watches of today are so numerous and cheap, that nearly every schoolboy can afford to carry a “time piece.” Yet all the clocks and watches in the world cannot tell the time of day unless regulated with the sun. They merely show the amount of passing time. The sun shows what time it is, whether morning, noon or night.
Strange mistakes are often made by relying solely on clock time. A party of travelers, not long ago, were on their way west through Arizona. Arriving at Yuma at eight o’clock, railroad time, they were surprised to find the dining room clock indicating an hour earlier. Still more were they surprised, after having leisurely eaten breakfast, to learn on embarking again, that it was but six o’clock. Strange, they thought; arrive at eight; breakfast at seven; and leave at six! Two hours gain! But the clocks were right. The first kept Jefferson City, Mo. time; the second was Yuma time; and the last was San Francisco time.
Places east and west of each other cannot have the same time. Only those directly north and south are thus favored. Could a man continually travel around the earth, keeping with the sun, he might live his allotted space of “three score years and ten” within a single day, for the sun would never rise or set to him. It would always be day. Yet even then he could not make time. He could not prolong his life, nor give to the world more hours. The only way to make time is to make use of it, every moment as it comes. Time once gone is time gone forever, whether the clock says so or not.
Source: Daily Evening Bulletin newspaper. March 30, 1883.
