Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The history of timekeeping devices dates back to when ancient civilizations first observed astronomical bodies as they moved across the sky.
Over millennia, humankind’s time-tracking has grown increasingly precise. Sundials divided days into hours. Clocks broke hours into quarters and minutes, and finally minutes into seconds.
The earliest method of measuring time was through observation of the celestial bodies - the sun, moon, stars and the five planets known in antiquity.
Great advances in accurate time-keeping were made by Galileo Galilei and especially Christiaan Huygens with the invention of pendulum-driven clocks along with the invention of the minute hand by Jost Burgi. [34]
Timekeeping is simply a matter of counting these oscillations to mark the passage of time. For much of history, the chosen periodic phenomenon was the apparent motion of the Sun and stars across the sky, caused by the Earth spinning about its own axis.
This brief essay on the history of timekeeping was conceived and written by Kent Higgins and illustrated by Darwin Miner, of the Program Information Office of the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) in about 1975, and printed in booklet form for distribution to visitors to the Boulder Laboratories.
A brief history of timekeeping. Humans’ concept of time has evolved with our ability to track it. John Harrison’s marine chronometer eventually won the British government’s prize for...
A Walk Through Time - A Revolution in Timekeeping. In Europe during most of the Middle Ages (roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE), technological advancement virtually ceased. Sundial styles evolved, but didn't move far from ancient Egyptian principles.
Before the advent of a means to measure time, it was, effectively, unkept. Lunar calendars arrived first, with the earliest contenders dating back at least 10,000 years. To divide our days into...
The atomic clock was a dream long before it was a reality. The dream started in the 1870s, when famed British scientists James Clerk Maxwell and William Thompson (better known as Lord Kelvin) proposed a bold and radical new idea. William Thompson (aka Lord Kelvin) and James Clerk Maxwell: intellectual forefathers of the atomic clock.