For a modern person, the division of time into seconds, minutes and hours, as well as days, months, years, is a matter of course. And at the beginning of its development, humanity mastered the concept of time in different ways and invented ways to measure it. So who invented the timing?
What is time?
Physicists have made a shocking discovery - in nature, time does not exist and never existed! In nature, only processes take place, they can be periodic or non-periodic. The concept of "time" was invented by people for their own convenience. Time is a measure of the distance between two events.
Who invented the first watch?
Man has invented many ways to measure time. First, the time at sunrise and sunset was measured. An increase or decrease in the shadow falling from various objects - stones, trees, helped a person somehow navigate in time. The time was also determined by the stars (at night, at different times, different stars are visible).
The ancient Egyptians divided the night into twelve intervals. Each gap began with the rise of one of the twelve specific stars. The Egyptians divided the day into the same number of intervals. Our division of the day into 24 hours is based on this.
Later, the Egyptians created a shadow clock (we call it a sundial). They are a simple wooden stick with marks. The shadow clock became the first human invention designed to measure time. Of course, the sundial could not tell the time on a cloudy day and at night. One of the oldest written documents dating back to 732 BC. about the sundial is the Bible (the twentieth chapter of the Book of Kings). It mentions the obelisk clock of King Ahaz. A sundial of the 13th and 15th centuries discovered during excavations. BC. indicate that in reality the sundial appeared much earlier than the writing suggests.
The ancient Egyptians also created a water clock. They measured the length of time during which the liquid flows from one vessel to another.
The hourglass appeared in the 8th century. They are two welded flasks. The sand poured into one of the flasks is poured through the narrow neck of the other flask over a certain period of time, for example, an hour. After that, the clock is turned over. The hourglass is cheap, reliable, so it still hasn't disappeared from our lives.
Mechanical clocks appeared in Europe in the 1300s, they worked with scales and springs. They had no hands, and the call signaled the passage of an hour.
In modern electronic and quartz watches, vibrations of quartz crystals are used.
The atomic balance is the benchmark. They measure the transition time of an atom from a negative to a positive energy state and back.
