Posts

Showing posts from December, 2017

The first watch

Image
The interest of humans to dominate time remotes to the first stages of  human existance. Firstly, they used their bodies to determine time (for example, when they were hungry, it was time to eat). Of course, this system wasn´t accurate, because they didn´t base the hours on constant phenomena, but on their sensations. The first thing we could consider a watch was a solar watch. It marked the time using a gnomon (a stick which was placed vertically). It projected a shadow in a semicircle in which 12 lines had been drawn, representing the 12 hours of a day. The problem was how to measure time at night, but for Prehistory it was quite good.