Time Telling through the Ages

by Harry Chase Brearley

Did you ever, at the end of a journey—perhaps across water, or up to the top of some high hill—look backward to the place from whence you came, and wonder that it seemed so far away?

Now as we have completed our journey together through the history of man's struggle to gain knowledge and control over time, we are impressed with the great contrast between Time as it was to mankind in the beginning, and Time as it is to us to-day.

The caveman, with whom we began this story, lived close to nature, taking his sense of time from her as he took all else. Morning was when the light came, and he waked and was hungry; noon was when the sun was highest, and night was the time of lengthened shadows and the state of darkness. We see these same things, but, for us, they have not the same meanings. We count the time by hours and minutes, and we reckon these by machines which we have made, called clocks and watches. These mean so much more to us that, when we set all the clocks forward another hour to save daylight, it seemed to us as if we had changed the actual time. It was practically as if we had performed the miracle of Joshua, who in Bible story, made the sun stand still, or the miracle of Isaiah, who made the shadow go back ten steps on the dial of Ahaz. After a few days, we did not feel as if we had set the clocks; we felt as if we had made the sun wait for us, and the very day come earlier.

And so it is with the seasons. The caveman called it spring when the swallows came, and autumn when the leaves changed their color. But we judge of these things by the calendar; we say that the spring "is very late this year," or that the "leaves are beginning to turn early." We have a proverb that one swallow does not make a summer; no, nor do all the swallows, so far as we moderns are concerned. It is summer for us upon a certain day, no matter what the swallows do, but for the caveman, summer was when the swallows came, whenever that might be.

It is like that to-day among primitive peoples. The Turk who listens for the crowing of a cock or the braying of an ass to tell him of the hour, or calls the cat to him to look at its eyes and judge the time by the shape of their pupils—he is more like the caveman in this than like ourselves. So is the South Sea Islander, who knows the season of the year from the direction of the trade-winds. So is the patient savage, who cares little as to how long he must wait for the creature he is hunting to come near the spot where he lies hidden.

How different it all is with ourselves! We rise at a certain hour, and so many minutes later we have our breakfast. At such a time, we must be at work. Our work itself is all made of appointments one after another, or of tasks to be finished within a certain time. Our meals, our hours of rest, our meetings with our friends, our recreations, and our pleasures—all these, until, again, at a certain time we go to bed, in order that so many hours of sleep may make us fit for the next day, are measured by the clock and counted out by the tick of a toothed wheel or the regular swing of a pendulum.

We say that the savage has no sense of the value of time. We have, and it is by that fact largely that we are better off than he. Value means measure; you cannot value a thing unless you can measure it exactly. And so because we can measure time, we can see what time is worth to us, and make it worth more. The savage keeps an appointment—when he happens to make one. But we, because we know how long it takes to reach a certain place, or how long a time we need or wish to spend with a certain man, can make and keep many appointments. We can travel like the wind from place to place, because in measuring time we can measure speed, and therefore we can make speed safe and possible. We can talk to a friend a thousand miles away, or signal by electric waves around the world. We do these things because our sense of time has told us that the old way of sending letters and messages was too slow. And so we have set to work to invent ways that should be quicker. We should never have had the telephone, the cable, or the wireless, unless we had cared about time and been able to measure it.

The caveman lived, perhaps, as many years as we—but how much did he do in those years? We, who have learned to measure years and to allot each day or hour to sundry tasks, have made ourselves able to do far more in a life-time—many times more. We do not live a greater number of years, but it is as if we lived many lives in one. We speak of time as we speak of money, of saving and wasting and spending. Well, Time is Money, as Ben Franklin said, but it is something more—Time is Life. And we think of our lives as so much time at our command, and therefore we can make the most of them. The gulf between us and the primitive men is a contrast of living less or more, and our more life comes in great measure from our having learned to measure time.

Everyone has read the story of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp. You will remember that the poor boy came into possession of a lamp which quickly made him the richest and most powerful person in the world, since, through owning it, he could control the service of a mighty genie, able to perform the most incredible tasks.