Time, one of humankind's greatest invention.

in #science7 years ago (edited)

Clocks were inaccurate before the sixteenth century, in other words they were terrible. Most of the time, there was only one large mechanical clock in the middle of any town which would reboot daily and sooner or later by the end of the day it would be off as much as twenty minutes essentially. At that time, people would roughly guess the time. But so what? At that time, life was simply, people did not really care about this issue as there was really no deep meaning of it being accurate. As at that century, there really was no demand for accurate clocks in day to day life. So the demand for accurate clocks started when explorers began to travel across the world via sea. The ideal way to calculate their locations at that time was to have two clocks. One with the time of the ship's origin, in other worlds the time of place where the ship had began. And the other was time calculated with an sundial. Google defines the sundial as "A sundial is a device that measures time by using a light spot or shadow cast by the position of the Sun on a reference scale." So the former clock calculating the current time. With each four minute of difference between the two times of the clocks, you would have understood that you approximately one hundred and ten kilometers. But with this method, there was one fatal flaw. It was with the accuracy of the two clocks. Similar to the clocks mentioned before at town centers, the initial clocks where the ships travelled from where off by as much as twenty minutes by the end of the day. So it meant using this method, it was pointless for long trips of journeys as it the time on the clock will be off by countless minutes as the days pass by. Because of this issue, it hindered the progression of exploration. So world leaders around the globe decided to offer prizes akin to millions of dollars today to anyone in the world who could invent an accurate clock. And on such person did invent it. His name? Italian polymath Galileo Galilei. From past records, it has been perceived that in 1583, an nineteen year old teen galileo was really bored when he was praying in an church. And because he was bored, he was watching the hanging lamps on the ceiling of the church. He noticed that, as the lamps swang back and forth, the hanging lamps always took the most precise amount of time to complete one full swing. No matter what distance they swang, the swing would still take the same amount of time. fifty eight years pass, this property was used exactly to make an pendulum clock. If weighted correctly, an pendulum itself could be made to swing once per second, and the clocks would essentially use this swinging weight to measure time. And because of this invention, this clock was so accurate. After an week and being adjusted, it would only be off by as much as a minute. And this type of clock started to grow in popularity after an century. Historians debated that if this invention did not take place, the industrial revolution that pushed humanity forward so fast would not have occurred. And now, time was more accurate, and people were able to meet each other at the exact time at an place. And now these clocks could be used for navigation in ships. Because of more accurate time, the way people did things changed. Before when time was inaccurate, people only work based on results. And when the day comes to an end, people were paid for how much they have worked instead of how much they work, with new accurate clocks, people were able to work based on an hourly basis. Then the concept of timezones started to pop up, different places used different times. And in the beginning of the 20th century, another invention had made clocks even more accurate and cheap to produce. Two french physicists somewhere, noticed something peculiar. They noticed that when electricity was applied to quartz, it vibrates at an very stabilized rate. And then they figured out that quartz vibrates 32,768 times per second, makers of clocks were able to use this property to make even more accurate clocks. These amazing clocks were so accurate that they were able to go a month only losing 15 seconds or gaining 15 seconds. The pendulum clock accelerated the industrial revolution, and the quartz clock accelerated the technological revolution. As without the invention of quartz clocks, computers would simply not exist. An internal clock needs to be accurate to coordinate the various microprocessors inside an computer. Just because galileo was bored when doing prayers, the pendulum clock was invented. Just because 2 physicists had found an incredible property of quartz, the quartz clock was invented. There was also the invention of the atomic clock, it had incredible accuracy. What revolution will happen next for humankind?

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