Hi Kevin;
Wow, this is great.
So you didn't need a sundial, you were the sundial.
Just compare the length of your shadow by your height...
...just count the number of feet, your feet, the length of your shadow.
I'll give that a try tomorrow when the sun comes out.
Thanks everyone for the responses.
Fabulous!
brent
Kevin Karney wrote:
Brent
This is a HUGE series of questions you have raised. Here are a few
observations....
Remember that clocks for the masses are very very new (mid to late 19th C).
Throughout most of civilization, there were 12 unequal hours between sunrise
and sunset. The marked time on a sundial was an event-indicator rather than
time as we now (seem to) understand it.
Even in early days, sundials were mainly the preserve of the rich, the
astronomers, the intellectuals and the city fathers.
Here are some quotes...
Aristophanes 446 – ca.386 BC from his play the 'Assembly of Women' where women
took over the government......
When your shadow is ten times the length of your foot,
all you have to do is… ... perfume yourself and come to dinner ....
Plautus - 254 – 184 BC
The Gods damn the man who first discovered the hours and - yes - set up a
sundial here which has smashed the day into bits.
When I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial, by far the best and truest
compared to these: it used to warn me when to eat.
St Leofric's Missal 9 - 11C AD
Martius et October, Hora Tertia et Nona, Pedes XIII, Hora VI Pedes VII
= the length of your shadow in March & October is 13 feet at the 3rd & 9th Hour
(unequal hours after sunrise) and 7 feet at noon
(with 5 similar rules for the other months - the hours being - unsurprisingly
the times of the Benedictine Terce, Sext, None prayer times)
William Chaucer ca 1343 - 1400
It was four o’clock according to my guess
Since eleven feet, a little more or less,
My shadow at the time did fall, considering that I myself am six feet tall.
Accurate time (as we now understand it) grew primarily out of the needs of
navigators - and with that need, clocks really came into their own. But where
astronomers were not available to give accurate time through noon balls or
cannons. Clocks were set using sundials with the equation of time correction.
It was the railways - and the advent of the telegraph to transmit accurate
astronomer's time - that introduced national mean time and heralded the end of
the serious timekeeping life of the sundial.
It's a fascinating subject....
See also some in text comments below...
best regards
Kevin Karney
On 19 Nov 2010, at 21:41, Brent wrote:
I wonder what life was like before mechanical clocks.
I suppose your day was less structured than ours are today.
Maybe to work at sunrise, go home at sunset.
Eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are tired.
I wonder how many people used sundials? Was it a common thing to have?
Was it a necessity?
How did everyone show up on time for a 9pm Opera?
What was the accurate time of day good for back then?
Before mechanical clocks you probably wasted a lot of time waiting for people
or events.
Who cared about accurate time, and why?
Churches? & Mosques - St Benedict set the time of prayer - followed in
principle - my the Muslims. The Christians were more interested in an
understandable more-or-less repeatable regular structure i.e. event markers. While
the Muslims were more concerned with a precise timing of their prayer - hence their
complex timing of prayer based (once more) on shadow lengths (Asr prayer begins
when the length of any object's shadow equals the length of the object itself plus
the length of that object's shadow at noon - different but comparable definitions
by different muslim schools) and superseded by sophisticated sundials
At night time, monks did not waste money on such things as expensive candle
clocks to dictate the timing of Compline. One particular monk was told to wake
up in the middle of the night and wake the others. He was not to be fed too
much in the evening unless his stomach troubled him and his time keeping
regularity was upset
Armies?
Courts? - They did not concern themselves so much with the 'when' as the how long - for
which they used water clocks (clepsidra). The judge in ancient times would decide if a
case was legally interesting enough to warrant a large or small clepsidra. Both
prosecution and defence has until "time ran out" to make their case.
Prostitutes used a similar strategy.
Scientists? - Yes - astronomers. Ptolemy 150AD understood exactly all about the
equation of time. He needed that understanding - not to tell the time - but to
fit his theories of lunar movements
Governments?
Sailers? - Needed for Longitude calculations
Sundials became very sophisticated, but why? To calibrate the clocks in the
absence of time signals
thanks;
brent
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