Time Telling through the Ages

by Harry Chase Brearley

Time Pieces Vital to Industry

Without the ability to record time, and, therefore, to control it, the complex web of human activity would become hopelessly tangled.

You buy a newspaper, making sure that you are getting the latest edition, and it is at once as though you looked into a great mirror reflecting the activities of all the world, but all of the dispatches bear a date-line, and many of them are also marked with the hour.

Before the days of newspapers, people felt themselves to be a part of the lives of their own immediate neighborhood and knew only vaguely of what went on at a distance, but now each day one feels himself to be a part of the great human family and can sometimes make his plans with reference to things that may be occurring thousands of miles away. But the newspaper itself is a product of clockwork; there is perhaps no institution whose workers keep closer track of the passage of the minutes.

In view of all these things, does it seem too much to claim that if all the timepieces in existence were destroyed and men were given no other means for telling time, civilization would swiftly drop to pieces and man would find himself traveling backward to the conditions of the caveman?

But there is one thing in our modern timekeeping which we still have in common with the first men who ever kept the time. We still go by the sun and the stars and refer all our measure to that apparent revolution of the heavens which we know to be really the motion of our world itself. As did those wise men of old Babylon, so do we even now, spying upon the mighty master clock of the universe to correct all our little timepieces thereby. A man sits alone in an observatory, with his eye to a telescope. That telescope is of a certain kind, called a "transit." It is fixed upon the meridian, the north-and-south line in the sky over that place. And a thread of spider-web across the lens marks for him the exact position of the line, in the very middle of his field of view. So as he watches, he can see one star after another come into view at one side of the glass and pass across it to the other side and disappear. He is watching the world go round.

A certain star appears, one which his calculations have told him will cross the meridian at a certain particular instant. Beside him is an electrical device connected with a clock, which marks off seconds at intervals round a revolving drum. The star draws nearer to the center of his field. As it crosses the hair-line, the observer touches a key, and the precise instant of its crossing is recorded upon the drum, to within a fraction of a second. Since the clock has marked its record of the seconds there, the clock can be corrected by the star.

Now, if that man had been a priest in Babylon, he would have kept his knowledge as a means of power to himself and to his equals. If he had been a dweller in a somewhat later age, he would have kept it to himself no less, either because people would not believe, or because the claim of too deep knowledge of the secrets of nature might put his life in danger. But he is a modern, and so his knowledge is for all who seek it.