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Sundials - Telling Time Before Clocks · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Alex, what time is it?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's 7 a.m.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: on a Thursday, like it always is when we meet.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, here's the funny thing.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I want to talk about a dead end.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: And this dead end is so specific to where you are that if it was 7 a.m.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: for you, it could be 7.14 for me.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'm talking about technology from back in the day that was used to tell time.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: This little thing called the sundial.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Have you heard of that one?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: That is a dead end.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: That is a dead end.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, no, you can still buy sundials on Amazon.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's there's plenty of them, but let me tell you.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Museums have them.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: Museum.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, usually it's like a little thing right in the entrance to get people in, um, even though it's cloudy.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: No, they're they're pretty cool.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: Tech, they fall under the categories of chronometry or horology.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever heard of those two things?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: No, but it makes sense.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and what's different about those two categories, uh, chronometry uh is basically the establishment of the standards of time.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: So it has to do with like the whole idea of time, the concept of time, and the standards that we follow in the 24-hour clock and all that.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: Horology is actually the study and interest in mechanical timekeeping devices.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're a horologist, you are studying oh, all kinds of stuff clocks, watches, sundials, hourglasses, timers, marine chronometers, atomic clocks.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Are you into any of that?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think uh uh hourglasses are kind of cool.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: Hourglasses are cool, and I actually considered uh doing hourglasses as my dead end, but the reason I pick sundials is because I think hourglasses hourglasses are more uh popular still than sundials are, would you say?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think people still use them like in board games.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: You might have a little hour flip flip a thing over.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: If you're cooking, you might use one, maybe.
• 2:18
  unknown: I don't know.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know about that.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like time through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: But sundial is something that's yeah, not too many people are that's more of a dead end.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're right.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's used to uh tell the time of day, doesn't work at night very well because of the word sun.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: And do you know what uh time of day is actually referred to?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's called civil time.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: If you're talking about the time of day.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's just called it's called civil time.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um they'll use that a lot in aviation and and uh nautical stuff.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: They'll talk about it, you know, a certain time, civil time.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um well a sundial basically consists, if you've never seen one, of a flat plate that's known as the dial, and then there's a thing called a gnomon, which it's G-N-O-M-O-N, and that is the thing that casts the the shadow onto the dial.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: So a gnomon can be a variety of things.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: It could be like a rock, it could be a stone, it could be a piece of metal, it could be uh an iron, like a um more like a wire kind of thing.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: There's a ton of different designs for sundials, and a lot of that has to do with a couple of things.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: Number one is whether it's mounted vertically or horizontally.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: There are sundials that actually go on walls.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever seen one of those?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: No, but that sounds cool.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I guess it would work best if it was uh uh facing a direction where the sun actually hit it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um but there's also um there are also sundials that are designed to account for different elements and be more accurate.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: Because the thing is, unless you know true north from where you are, you're on a perfectly level surface, and you know the latitude that you're at, you actually can't get an accurate reading with the sundial.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: You have to have those three ingredients the latitude, the level surface, and where true north is.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Do you need a big area to make one?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or can you do it like in a little square?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: No, they they there are some pretty small ones.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: I would say that um bigger ones are probably more um precise because they have what we'd almost call today higher resolution.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's more space for that uh shadow to move.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, a little tiny movement, you could see it better on a big one than you could on a small one.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, on a small one, it might look like it's moving really slow.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas if you had a really big sundial, you might actually see the shadow moving if you looked at it long enough.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: The ones in museums are usually pretty big, that's why I ask.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they're like those giant chest sets.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you know, all boring stuff is cooler when it's big, right?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: I remember going stopping in Ohio to see the world's largest rocking chair.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Although the world's smallest rocking chair is nothing to sneeze at either.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: That's true, that's true.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well, so a lot of the problems with um sun dials have to do with the fact that the earth is not in a perfectly circular orbit.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh you know, it's more of an oval shaped, and also that the earth tilts throughout the year.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: So the sun dial can be off by as much as almost 17 minutes.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: So if you set it in the spring, you know, when you reach the farthest point away from the spring, which I guess would be the middle of the fall, it could be off by as much as uh 17 minutes, and then it'll start to go back into time because the earth's rotating back and forth.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that blows me away about some of these old techs that we talk about, you know, whether it's a sundial or whether it's a uh record player, is we think of ourselves as modern human beings who have come a long way.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: We're technologically sophisticated, but we kind of think we're superior to um the the old people, the people back in the day.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: But if you think about it, they had to actually be smarter than us to make these things work, right?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: We just we just look at our watch or ask ask Google or Siri what time it is, and and they tell us.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: But for these people, they had to do all these parameters, know where they were, test it.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, if they wanted an accurate sundial, even even somebody who just had one at home would have to do all this stuff, you know, like the the rich and the wealthy and the I I mean can you imagine actually understanding how how that works?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's not something we would invest energy in.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: I guess the only thing I would say to that is probably back then it didn't really matter what time it was.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man, that's that's uh that's timest.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: No, it it isn't.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: I I think no because the fact that we all got synchronized on time is something that I think happened with the railroads, right?
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and and when you talk about accurate time, we've kind of all agreed that everybody within a band, which we call a time zone, is in the same time.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: But like you're 150 miles away from me, it's gonna be darker first for me than it is for you.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Technically, we're not we shouldn't be on the same time, but we can't make it where every 10 miles it's a different time, so we have to agree.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we really couldn't use a sundial because we would come up with different readings, right?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: It would be a different time where you are than it is where I am, and that's impossible to get business done.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: But it didn't matter back in the day what time it was 150 miles away because you could never talk to those people.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: So, how did how did the Egyptian podcasters do this back in 1500 BC?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great question.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: They just spent their time building pyramids instead of uh doing podcasts.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, how precise did you need to be back then?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to know if it was daytime or nighttime, really.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there there wasn't really and you didn't even really have to know it was nighttime, you just things shut down, right?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: Until the invention of like oil lamps, you didn't really have night at uh light at night, so people just went to bed.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you wouldn't tell somebody I'll meet you at 645.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh at at um it would be I'll meet you at the uh oak tree um by the river at dusk.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean you just had the sun up and sundown.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, interestingly, back in those days, the early, early days, um, there there have been some of these ancient sundials found from Egypt in you know 2000 BC, 1500 BC, that are still recognizable.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um they were called shadow clocks.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like shadow clock is kind of a cool name.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: It'd be a good band name.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you think so?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of music would that be?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, definitely goth.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: I was yeah, I was thinking like EDM.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah kind of gothy EDM for shadow clocks.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: But then sundials, like the band the sundials, they're gonna be a lot more upbeat, a lot more popular, I think.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe even like a hippie kind of thing.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's actually a reference to shadow clocks and sundials um that are mentioned in the Bible.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um in the book of Isaiah and Second Kings, they talk about the dial of Ahaz.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: A H E Z.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean these have been around a long time.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: And and uh you know if they're keeping our biblical friends going and meeting, I mean none of all none of that stuff that we read in the Bible would have happened if people didn't have the dial of Ahaz.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh maybe it would have I don't know.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: I I still am not convinced that time was that important until the last couple hundred years, but sure.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, here's one of the most interesting things about sundials I found is that through through tradition, sundials almost always have some sort of a motto written on them.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: Did you did you know that?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: It has what written on them?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: A motto.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like a a phrase.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, like in Latin?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like a well back in the day, but um, you know, obviously uh as things evolve, they they change languages.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: You can you can actually buy a sundial on Amazon and it says, I am a sundial, I and I make a botch of what is done much better by using a watch.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: That is terrible.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: How is that?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: It probably sounds better in Latin, but that's terrible.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but you know what?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: As soon as um Shadow Clocks makes a song out of it, you're gonna love it.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's all I got on Shund Isles.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Shadows creep across the sand.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Whisper a secret, dark and grand.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sun tile spins round and round.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: In the void, no time is found.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Shadow's cold and brace.