Are We Too Obsessed with the Construct of Time

How many watches do you own? How many clocks do you have in your house? I have my clock radio to wake me up in the morning. I have the clock in the kitchen on the wall. Actually I never bought that clock it came with the apartment when I moved in. I have the clock on the microwave, the stove, the television converter, and of course the computers.

Have you ever considered how important the concept of time is to each of us here in North America and all over the world? Do you ever go out of your house without a watch or at least digital time recorded on your cell phone? It seems that many people would be lost without knowing what time it was at any given time of the day or night. Our schedules and the fabric of our daily lives are centered around time, or at least manmade constructs of time.

We don’t get up because it is daybreak and go to bed because it is night. We rely our clocks to tell us that it is 11:pm so it is time to go to bed, or it is 7:00 am and it is time to get up. If we are late for work or school we pay the consequences for it. If we take an extended lunch break or lunch hour at work we pay the consequences for it. If we come to a university exam too late we are not allowed to sit the exam and so on. No matter what we do we cannot get away from the concept of time. Time governs our lives whether we realize it or not. If you don’t think so, think about this article the next time you are waiting patiently on your boyfriend who is a half hour late, or when you are sitting in a hospital emergency room waiting for the news from the doctors about your sick loved one, or when you have been waiting for 20 minutes on the telephone for customer service.

History of time

Where did it all begin? The cavemen certainly didn’t wear a watch. Instead they would have been very vigilant about nature. They would guide their lives and their activities by the sun and the moon and the stars to tell the changing of the seasons and so on. The changes in nature would give them clues as to what to expect next. Of course that is fine when there is shrubbery and other sources of changes that could be visibly seen. However, if you are in the desert and all you have is sand then the sun and the moon and the stars are your only sources of knowing what time it is.

Even back then when you think that life was simpler it was important to have some kind of idea about time changes. Some desserts could get quite cold at night and you would want to get to your destination before the night set in. Or if you were in the woods you might want to get to your destination before dark when the wild animals came out and again you had to deal with the cold temperature after sunset.

Prehistoric man also needed a way of telling time to know when to plant, and they also used it for planning sacred rituals.

The earliest ancient civilizations used poles and sticks and even large structures such as the pyramids to tell time. It has been documented that the pyramids were built in alignment with the sun’s position in the sky. In Mexico the ancient Aztecs built the pyramid of Tenayuca to serve as a sundial and accurately predict the coming of the New Year.

Sundial, hourglass, and water clock

Man found need to have a construct of time and so they started in ancient days to build devices that would help them figure out time. The earliest sundial was just a round stone fashioned after the shape of the sun with some markings on it resembling the modern day clock. The sundial stood upright and the shadow cast upon it gave an indication of what time it was.

The hourglass also used in ancient times were two glass bulbs and one was filled with a pre-measured amount of sand, which emptied slowly into the second glass bulb to given an indication of the passing of time. Our modern day egg timer is a version of the hourglass.

The idea of the water clock or clepsydra as it was called was very similar to the hourglass. Water dripped from a spout out of container and as the water level descended the ancients could figure out the time.

By the 1300’s, a huge advance in telling time occurred when the first mechanical clocks which used bells to announce the time was introduced. These original clocks did not need faces since the sound of the bell indicated the time. These clocks used the weights of springs to power the bells.

A hundred years later it was discovered that the weights and springs could also move hands on the clocks to tell time with numbers.

By 1656, the pendulum clock was invented. The larger the clock the more accurate it was. The older clocks were off by as much as 15 minutes.

However, the pendulum clock, though a great advancement, was still not good for navigation at sea. For every minute lost at sea the ship could be off course by 15 miles. Many sailors lost their lives crashing against rocks because they were off course. In 1761, John Harrison was able to make a pocket watch so small and so accurate for British navigational use that it only lost five seconds in six and a half weeks.

Prior to the 1800’s, all watches and clocks were handmade and quite expensive until Eli Terri began to manufacture watch parts that could be mass-produced and used interchangeably in various clocks. This new invention revolutionized the clock industry and prices of clocks went down. Now the common folk could afford to have a clock to tell time.

In the early 1900’s, only women wore wristwatches. Men would have a pocket watch. No respectable gentleman would be seen wearing a wristwatch. However, World War II soon changed that. It was too difficult and time consuming in battle to pull out a pocket watch to tell time and so soldiers began to wear wristwatches. The fashion spilled over into civilian life and by the 1950’s, men as well as women were wearing wristwatches. Digital watches using quartz crystals also came out at this time.

In 1967, the atomic clock was invented. This clock, which uses the precision of oscillations of cesium-133 atoms, is so accurate that it loses a second for every 1. 4 million years. Yet it doesn’t end there. In 1999, scientists developed the cesium fountain atomic clock which loses one second every 20 million years and it is the most accurate clock in the world.

The concept of time is a survival as well as a psychological construct necessary for the well being of humankind

So we can safely say that developing a concept of time has been instrumental for the survival of humankind and so we have this concept of time in almost every known culture in the world past or present.

There are exceptions to this universal construct of time

There is a very different culture still with us today that does not rely on the manmade construct of time. The Hopi native people of Arizona have fascinated anthropologists and psychologists alike with their natural ways and simple living. Among their practices is their lack of a construct for time. To the Hopi, time is when the corn grows or the sunsets, or the children grow up. If you were to ask a Hopi when they expected a tribe member to return, you would not get the answer in a week like you would everywhere else in the world. You would get the answer when the sun rises and sets seven times.

The Hopi see time as a sequence of events. Time is not qualitative like time is to most people. Our concept of time is incomprehensible to the Hopi. The Hopi are not obsessed with time as we are. There isn’t a need for them to have clocks and watches and cell phones and microwaves with clocks on them. They are happy with their natural ways, the ways of the ancestors.

Perhaps we could learn from them and give up our obsession with time.

Sources:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=EeIDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA358&lpg=PA358&dq=pyramids+to+tell+time&source=bl&ots=cRsvDBM6_l&sig=rIVhSzWdAGpnW7pqRwhPMXfFSN8&hl=en&ei=GEIfS630LYa9lAe1pLyBDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=pyramids%20to%20tell%20time&f=false

http://www.time-for-time.com/history.htm http://books.google.ca/books?id=XSeGmS4uXykC&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=the+hopi+and+the+lack+of+a+concept+of+time&source=bl&ots=UJkk-xl8z7&sig=Qmwr2DARYCvOJrQqDyeowuu5ZDg&hl=en&ei=zVQfS7iuJZOYtgeNn4SXCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=the%20hopi%20and%20the%20lack%20of%20a%20concept%20of%20time&f=false