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Keeping Time · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
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• 0:42
  Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just hanging out
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: and we decided, Hey, do some talking about time keeping,
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: so that's what we're doing today.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Olivia helped us put this one together. I think
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: the charge was, Hey, how about something on the history
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: of time keeping? Mm hm without getting two in the
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: weeds about how all of these things work, because that's
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: a whole other thing, like if you want to really
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: break down clocks and watches. But I think she did
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: it just right. The Goldilock zone, as they say.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: Oh nice, nice astronomical cosmological reference there.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Well, I think that is a reference for a lot
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: of things, right, Nope, that Okay.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Where'd you get this idea? Because this was when you
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: came up with.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: You know, man, I don't know. I think I was
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: maybe thinking about a watch on my wrist and then
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: wondering or no, maybe I saw someone had a what
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: do you call those things that call it hourglass, and
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: I was wondering about just hourglasses, and then I started
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: thinking about like just you know, the concept of time
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: and when people started keeping time, and I was kind
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: of had a hunch and I was right that, you know,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: the need to keep time didn't come around til much later.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: So like as we'll see, early timekeeping was more like
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: seasonal or astrological, and it didn't get to be a
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: thing like hey, I have an appointment at a certain
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: minute until much much later.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but earlier than you'd think, or earlier than I thought.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: At least yeah, agreed.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: So speaking of timekeeping, you really can kind of say
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: the whole thing just started out with the sun. And
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: one of the neat things about life on Earth is
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: that you can cast a shadow. Most things cast a shadow,
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: with the exception of maybe like amba or something like that.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: But if you put like a stick in the ground,
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: it's going to cast shadows that move throughout the day.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: And if you really pay attention to this kind of stuff,
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: you can actually use it to track time throughout the day.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: And that is almost certainly the earliest way that humans
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: track time. And the stick they put in the ground
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: is widely known as anomon g nom n. I think
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: it means rod in Greek. Maybe I also saw that
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: it was slang in Greek for penis. No really, yeah,
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: and that just.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Just just like, hey, to check out the gnomon on
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: that guy.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, almost exactly. If not that, but just said an
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: ancient Greek Oh okay, got cha hellenic. Yeah, but just
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: tracking the shadow that the gnomon cast, hopefully just a
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: stick in the ground. Yeah, that's that was early timekeeping.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: Oh man, I have a thousand jokes. I'm just gonna
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: walk right past at this point.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: Good for you. Buddy, you're a pro.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: I know growing up here it's fifty four. So that was, yeah,
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: that's what people use for the longest time, and that eventually,
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: as we'll see, would carry over to things like sundials.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: But it's no surprise that China was way ahead of
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: the game as far as timekeeping goes, because the oldest
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: surviving sort of actual thing that we have comes from
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: northern China, from an archaeological site that they found dated
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: back to twenty three hundred BC. And again, as you'll see,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: this is a recurring theme. Like I mentioned, it wasn't
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: necessarily like hey, we got to keep the time from
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: day to day. It's more like, let's calculate the seasons
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: or you know, the things happening up in the sky.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: Right, because it was snowing in the middle of China
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: and somebody said what season is it, and somebody else said,
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: let's find out what this nomon And the other person's like, no,
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: don't pull that out, and they're like no, I mean
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: the stick.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: Right, They said, you can get canceled for that, right.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: So if you're like, well that sounds a lot like
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: a sun dial, you're right. The thing that sticks up
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: for the sun dial is a no mon. There's another
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: version of it that's even earlier than the sun dial,
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: it seems from ancient Egypt, called the shadow clock. Yeah,
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: it's actually really hard to describe. It's much easier to
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: just go look up. But imagine a capital t laying
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: flat on its back on the ground and it's raised
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: its head and neck up to look at its feet.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: That's essentially that's kind of perfect. Actually, thank you.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: I really thought about that one for a while. I
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: have to admit. But the shadow that that crossbar the
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: top of the tea casts on the rest of the
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: tea over the day is demarcated, so you can track
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: six hours a day as the sun is rising in
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: the east, and then you turn it around at noon
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: and then you track the next six hours of the
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: sun is setting in the west. Pretty spectacular considering that's
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: close to three thousand years old.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure for that descriptor to help you that
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: you were laying flat on your back with your neck
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: raised up looking at your feet.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sadly, I have to admit that I had to
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: go lay down and figure it out myself. Okay, that's good,
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: but yes I was.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, nice work. Finally to the sun dial. The first
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: round sun dial that we kind of know as a
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: sun dial seems like it was created by a Greek
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: philosopher name annex Mander, very cool name, not Alexander, but
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Annexmander of Malaitis. This was sixth century BC, but again
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: probably still tracking seasons at this point. The first sun
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: dials out of Greece that actually marked hours, like when
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: people started keeping track of the hourly time, and as
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: we'll see it, you know, it just gets more specific
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: until be eventually much later we'll get to minutes. But
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: the hourly timekeeping started in three point fifty BCE.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and then very quickly after that, around two to
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: eighty BCE, they came up with the Hemi cycle, which
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: is imagine like a cube block of stone with a
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: basin a bowl carved out of the middle, and then
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: they managed to cut it perfectly in half so that
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: you just have half of a bowl. That's a Hemi cycle,
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: Because it turns out all you need is half a
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: ball to make a sun dial like that. And I
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: really do wonder if somebody built them like that, like
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: they'd make the one, split it in two and then
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: all of a sudden they had two hemicycles to sell.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: I bet you're getting really good at describing things at
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: this juncture in your career.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: It took me long enough for almost two year eighteen.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: It is. It's dismaying to try to explain something and
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: just make it even more confusing than it was initially.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: I finally got dismayed enough that I decided to do
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: something about it. And what I did was lay down
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: naked and think it over.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: By the way, quick correction because a listener just wrote
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: in about this, we're about to be at your nineteen
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: and completed your eighteen technically no really, yeah, because you're
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: nineteen and you're twenty are the are you know the
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: two next years? Does that make sense?
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: It does, But I feel like it's wrong because started
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: in April two thousand and eight and going to April
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: of twenty twenty six, eighteen years completed. I see, yeah,
• 8:05
  Speaker 2: I should have known right when somebody busted out mathis
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: it's just been like, yeah, that's right.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: The cool thing about the Hemi cycle, besides the fact
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: that people back then probably said, is that thing a
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: hemi when they walked by, you know, it couldn't resist
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: that one. But they knew at that point it was
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: a pretty smart thing that the sun's position changes over
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: the course of the year, over the course of those seasons,
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: obviously shorter winter hours, which we're going to get to,
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: but they accounted for that. They had sun dials that
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: would show the time using multiple arcs carved into the
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: hemisphere to account for that sun changing over the course
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: of the year.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, So like the lines of the hours went up
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: like longitude, and then the seasons were like latitude, and
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: I guess just depending on how high up or how
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: shallow the shadows where you could tell what season it
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: was because it was within one of those arcs, or
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: two of those arcs, or three or four.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, and you know I mentioned the seasonal hours
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: when Greek sun dials started dividing daytime into twelve equal parts.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Obviously not hours, because we eventually ended up at twenty
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: four like not hours as we know it. But they
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: would depend on the length of the season, so it's
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: not like they accounted for it so they were all uniform.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: It was just like, hey, sometimes during the year, what
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: they will one day call an hour is longer than others,
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: which would lead to some kind of a cool thing
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: where ancient texts in Greece would refer to that like
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: a winter hour is something that could be done in
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: a shorter amount of time, Like that'll just take you
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: a winter hour.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And so this was the ancient Greeks. This lasted
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: well into the medieval period. That's how people did hours.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: The hour was longer in the summer, the hour was
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: shorter in the winter, and it was essentially their way
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: of what we do for daylight savings time by adjusting.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, except where just you know, modern humans are way
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: too anal to just let it kind of flow like
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: that still got to be exact, you.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: Know, right, right, Okay, so you got the sun dial,
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: and everybody was like, well, we move around a lot
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: and not every place has a sun dial, but I
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: always want to know what time it is. And what
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: humans do is take a technology and figure out how
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: to shrink it down into a portable size. And they
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: did that with sun dials too, usually made of bronze,
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: and because they were mobile, they would also have settings
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: and often instructions on how to adjust it depending on
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: where you were in the world. Like some of the
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: ancient ones that have been found have like just put
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: it to this setting if you're in Constantinople, or put
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: it in this setting if you're in Luxer, right, and
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: then other ones you kind of have to figure it
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: out a little more based on latitude. But they were
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: portable and essentially they were like pocket watches but amazing
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: bronze spheres sometimes.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So, like once they could do that, they would
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: hang it facing the sun so that that little pointer
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: I guess it was still called a gnomon at this point, I.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: Would think so. I think some people still call them
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: gnomons when they're referring to sun dials.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you're right. But they would face the
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: sun so that that pointer's shadow would hit the correct hour.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: Later on, they had different types that had like a
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: pinhole that let the beam of sunlight come through and
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: actually shine a mark on the hour, which was like
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: super advanced at the time.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was like the staff of raw model.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: So there was a big reason that people were keeping
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: track of the hours in ancient Rome, especially by the
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: time Rome came around. It wasn't necessarily to keep appointments,
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: although they certainly had that kind of thing, or to
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: keep time on stuff. One of the big things over
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: the years in different cultures, it turns out, was they
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: needed to time things, especially for something like drawing water.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: Like water was a communal resource and everyone had a
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: certain allotment, and they would divvy up those allotments not
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: by measuring how much water was taken out, but as
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: much water as you can within this you know, before
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: this beam of sunlight reaches this little line essentially, right.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, But in Rome they had an extra reason for it,
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: and that was because the hours of every single day,
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: or the first twelve hours of every single day, because
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: it wasn't initially that they were also like, let's track
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: the nighttime too. They just tracked from sunrise to sunset typically. Yeah,
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: each of those hours was associated with the different astrological sign.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: It was called planetary hours, and it was because so
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: you could maximize whoever you were worshiping. So like if
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: you were worshiping Seline the moon goddess, you wanted to
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: do that three hours after sunrise on Monday, and so
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: you would use some sort of time keeping device to
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: keep track of that.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And the same, of course is true in Islam.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: Once that became a big thing, the Muslims adopted sun
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: dials because they're you know, have to pray and at
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: different increments at different times, so it was really to
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: kind of keep up with their prayer hours. And they
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: are the ones who came up with, like, if you
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: have a sun dial in your garden, it's a little thing,
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: which we have one of those, about one for Emily
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: a few years ago. Cute. That kind of sun dial
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: is what the Muslims came up with. The one that's
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: got the flat circular base, and that nomon is am
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: I saying that right, Yeah, the nomon is parallel to
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: the polar axis of the planet Earth.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah. They also laid trigonometry on the whole thing and
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: came up with a bunch of different kinds of sun dials.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: There's one that was conical, and remember the Hemi cycle.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: Imagine taking that and just kind of squishing the bowl
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: and adjusting it at an angle. That's what a conical
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: sun dial is. They look amazingly cool, So I say,
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: look one of those up.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: And then finally I think before we break, we should
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: give a shout out to early thirteenth century Moroccan mathematician
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: Abou al Hasan al Marakushi, because this is the dude
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: that was finally like, you know what uniform hours is
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: where it's at, and we should start kind of keeping
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: track of this stuff in a uniform way, like actual
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: real timekeeping, and that kind of spread out all over
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: the world from there.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: Very nice. Yeah, all right, well let's take that break.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: Then it's time.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: All right, we'll be right back up with Joe shoe
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: on Chow.
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: Stop you shit, okay, Chuck.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: So we're back, and before we move on, I want
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: to say that I finally got it. Reggie Watts.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: Did you listen to it?
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, when I was qaing and I got it, and
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: I was like, man, that zuumed right past me.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: Well you were in a thought and I slipped it
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: in there very stealthily.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: It was very great. All right, nice little treat for
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: we're talking about the National Radio Quiet Zone episode. By
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: the way, everybody, that's right, so you got sun dials.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: Next thing that we moved on to is water. A
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: bunch of different cultures came up with water clocks. It's
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: not clear if again it started in China and moved
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: to Greece and then moved to the Muslim countries. Who knows,
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: But it's also possible that this that people came up
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: with us. There were just so many things available to
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: you to use to try to keep track of time,
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: and there were really simple water clocks. Water was eventually
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: used to run mechanical clocks, but the first ones essentially
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: were like almost our glasses made of water.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, essentially, what you're doing is you're either
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: keeping track of time by water draining out of something
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: that's marked by increments, or filling something up that's marked
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: by increments.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: Right, yeah, pretty much. I mean that's essentially it. And
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: you could supplement sun dials with these, because on a
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: sun dial, if it was really overcast, yeah, you had
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: no idea what time it was at night. These things
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: worked as well, though really there were two problems with them.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: One was that they would freeze. If it was freezing water,
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: clock probably wouldn't work quite as well. And then also
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: the viscosity of water can change depending on variables like
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: temperature and stuff like that, so they weren't entirely accurate
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: or reliable all the time. But they did the trick
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: for enough time that people started to improve on them
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: and add different kind of engineering principles like floats and
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: valves and siphons to regulate water more accurately.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I wonder if there was ever like, sorry, I'm late,
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: you know, we had a cold snap. My water clock froze,
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Like you got to move those things inside, buddy.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: I guarantee somebody use that excuse.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. But because of the issues with water
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: and temperature and stuff like that, mercury became a pretty
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: reliable substitute. This was in tenth century CE, and it
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: was a Chinese engineer who figured this out, and that basically,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: you know, solved a lot of the problems because mercury
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: wouldn't freeze, it wouldn't have different viscosities at different temperatures,
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: and it would ensure that you're on time to that appointment.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that engineer was Jiang si Jun.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Nay show off. I was just gonna walk right past that.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: Here's my favorite kind of early Oh me too, is it? Yeah?
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: I surprised. Yeah, incense clocks.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm not even into incense anymore. I was
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: in college. I think, like most people.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: Are same here. I used to burn some frank incense man.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, me too, But I really love this one. This
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: existed in China at least since the sixth century CE.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: Also in other parts of Asia and Korea and Japan
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: for sure. But it's I love the idea because essentially
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: it's it's almost like a fuse, and as we'll see
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: it sometimes was a literal fuse, but incense was burned
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: and used as a timer, like how quickly does that
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: thing burn down and stop burning?
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah. The coolest ones though, were incense clocks that were
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: like a box and it was essentially like an intricate
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: maze that you would pack with incense and then light it.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: And there were different I guess stencils that you'd put
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: on top of the box to create different times. So
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: like if you wanted an hour, that was a very
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: simple maze. If you wanted the whole night, it was
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: a much more intricate maze. And that's another thing I
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: would say to look up. There's a lot of stuff
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: you should go and look up throughout this episode, and
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: incense clocks are definitely one of them.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but I'm glad you saved this one for me
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: because I think it's the coolest part about all of
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: the incense clock stuff is that they had different sense
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: and it just makes sense over the course of a
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: night where you could smell the time, so you knew
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: when a certain smell came up what time it was,
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: which I think is super like ingenious and its simplicity,
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: and also like, you know, you know what happens at
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: sandal with time, sexiest time.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I've got jokes that I'm keeping it myself.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah good.
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: There are also alarm clocks. You could use the heat
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: from an incense stick I guess or whatever to basically
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: burn through a thread and drop a bunch of like
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: bells or something into a metal dish. That'll wake you
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: up for sure every time. And apparently Chinese messengers would
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: take incense and light one end and put the other
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: in between their toes and wake themselves up like that,
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: which is man, just drink a bunch of water. That's
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: all you need to do. Don't burn your toes.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah that's true, but like I said, that's like literally
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: lighting a fuse and it like, you know, you get
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: the hot foot and you know it's time to get
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: up and deliver the mail or whatever.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: We also have candle clocks that came along. This is
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: the medieval era. Notably, Alfred the Great supposedly would get
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: his day together and time it by six candles. Each
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: would burn for about four hours, so six times four
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: twenty four.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah. You could also take say a four hour candle
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: and break it, like just mark equal lines across it
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: and basically track of time like that too. Then there's astrolabes.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: I'm not even gonna try to really describe an astrolab Yeah, go.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: Look those up.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: They are incredibly intricate mechanically. They were invented by Muslims
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: in I think the sixth century CE, so it's just
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: amazing that they were able to do this. And astrolabes
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: were used at c until the sexton came along about
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: a thousand years later. Essentially, that's how effective they were.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: But you could navigate with them, you could survey with them.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: You could also keep time with them because you just
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: adjust the astrolabe to mimic the stars or something like that,
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: and you can be like, oh, it's two thirty, it's
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: Sandalwood time.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: That's right, it's Sandalwood time. Then we finally get to
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: the hour glass. Yes, but later than you think, and
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: especially and I'm glad Livia dug Deep because she's a
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: great researcher. But if you just sort of do cursory
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: Internet research. You might find a lot of people saying
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: it's ancient Egypt, but that's probably not the case. It's
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: actually much later than that, probably the late medieval period
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: that hourglasses came along, and actually after the mechanical clock
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: that's nuts. The earliest known reference is in Italy in
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: thirteen thirty eight. And you think an hourglass is pretty
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: easy to make, like, you know, you just blow the
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: glass in a certain way and throw the sand in there.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: But sanda spinicky as you know, as far as humidity
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: and moisture goes, So you had to get the sand
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: in there, you had to seal it up, but you
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: couldn't seal it up with any kind of moisture because
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: it would clump up. So it's a little trickier to
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: make an hourglass than you might imagine.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, when it's humid out, the soap opera Days of
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: Our Lives never get started, right, It's sad.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: Was that the one you watched in college?
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: I think that's what people wrote in and said, yeah, I'm.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Pretty sure I couldn't remember.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: So one of the other things humans do when they
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: have an invention that's popular and widespread, they don't just
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: shrink it down to a miniature portable size. They also
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: just show off they do whatever they can to make
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: it even cooler. And there were a succession of inventors
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: in different parts of the world over the years that
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: did some really neat stuff with say like water clocks.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: One was a guy named Andre Nkos. He was from
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: Macedonia and he built what's called the Tower of Winds
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: in Athens. It's this I think hexagon or octagon made
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: of marble that's fifteen meters or about forty five feet tall,
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: still standing, but when it was in use, it had
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: water clocks that had sundials, you could gauge the wind,
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: you could tell what was going on celestially. He just
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: basically packed every Niedo timekeeping invention that was around at
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: the time end of this thing.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and like you said, a lot of people just
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: started getting just sort of fancy with it and actually
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: just really creative. In eighth century CE, there was a
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: Chinese Buddhist monk who along with his colleagues, created a
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: clock that was a water powered wheel had a gear system.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: This is when gears really started becoming a huge thing
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: in time keeping. Yeah, and it did a single rotation
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: every twenty four hours, which you think, like, all right,
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: that just sounds sort of regular. But it also had
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: like bells chiming on the hour, and I had a
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: drumbeat that chimed every quarter hour. So this is when
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: like kind of hearing chimes and things to tell you
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: what time it was came in.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: It went but in every fifteen that's right. There's a
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: guy named Sousung who is very famous for his thirty
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: five foot I also saw it described as forty foot
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: clock tower. One of the things it did were there
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: were mannequins that came out and rang gongs. Yeah, like
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: you usually associate this with like maybe some sort of
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: cuckoo clock or something like that. This is from the
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: eleventh century, so it's pretty impressive that he came up
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: with this. And again it was a water clock, like
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: this is running on water. And then someone else who
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: put water clocks to great use was a just this
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: amazing inventor and engineer. His name was Ismael al Jazari.
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: He was from Upper Mestamia, and his whole thing was
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: not just accurate clock timekeeping, but just essentially delightful little
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: add ons that did some cool stuff. He created what's
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: called the castle clock. That's pretty neat, but for my money,
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: look up the elephant clock. There's a life size replica
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: of it at a museum I think in Saudi Arabia,
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: and you can see, you know, how it works and
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: what it does. But essentially, water just moves from part
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: to part. There's a scribe in the middle riding on
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: the elephant. There's another person on the front of the
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: elephant driving it. There's another guy way up there play
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: symbols and stuff. It's just amazing, especially when you learn
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: about how every single step works.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah that thing you sent that to me, that was
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: super cool looking. Yeah, very ornate. Now we kind of
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: get to the point, shall we break her? Can we
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: keep going?
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's take a break, all right.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: We'll be right back up with Joe shoe on cho.
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: Stuff is shit.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: All right, So we're back to wrap it up on
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: clocks and eventually spoiler watches. But we're at the point
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: now where clocks kind of start ticking and we're getting
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: closer and closer to keeping track of seconds, although that'll
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: be a second till we get to it. But as
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: for mechanical clocks, go those water powered Chinese clocks arguably
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: were their first mechanical clocks. And again it's one of
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: those things where they don't know if people invented these
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: in Europe or their Muslim world at the same time,
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: or if it kind of spread out from one place
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: to another. Another origin story is maybe mechanical clocks came
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: from Europe with it. Would it be Gerbert? I think so,
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: Gerbert of Arlac, who was a French scholar, but you
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: might know him a little better as Pope Sylvester the Second. Oh, okay,
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: because he would become pope later on. He developed I
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: guess in his pre pope days a mechanical type timekeeping device,
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: like truly mechanical in nine ninety six CE. But then
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: it took a few hundred years for it to become
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: like for mechanical clocks to become a real thing. It
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: didn't really catch on, right.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: Which makes some people suspect that that he might not
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: have actually done that. Yeah, so what's happened here? I
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: guess we've transitioned from tracking the movement of water to
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: track time to actually using the kinetic energy in water
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: that's say, flowing downhill, to run gears and stuff like that.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: Those are the mechanical time devices that were some of
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: the original mechanical It's like the Chinese came up with
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: this a very long time ago. When Europe got involved,
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: they removed water to run gears and replace them with weights.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: But it's the same principle at work. Like if you
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: hold a weight up on a rope and let it
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: fall down, gravity's gonna pull it toward the Earth and
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: it's releasing kinetic energy. If you can control its descent,
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: you can use that to turn gears into keep track
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: of time in a very specific way. I mean, it's
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: not nearly as accurate as anything we tracked time with today,
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: but it was still pretty impressive that they were making
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: these in like the thirteenth century.
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. There was a monk in twelve seventy
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: one named Robertus Anglicus who he talked about there was
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: actually a Latin term horologia, which is the Latin term
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: for time measuring device, and they were using weights to
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: turn wheels like exactly one time over the course of
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: one day. And again they would get kind of break
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: that down and get more specific as they learn more
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: about gears and how the weights work. But you know,
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: the weights if you look at a grandfather clock or
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: a cuckoo clock, like these things all have and we'll
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: get to the pendulums. Not only pendulums and a grandfather clock,
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: but it's weights that are still operating this thing.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and one of the inventions that really kind of
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: it was a game changer. It's called the virgin foliot mechanism. Essentially,
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: you remember in Karate Kid two where all of those
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: okay now and villagers are sitting there playing their hand drums. Yeah, yeah, okay,
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: So that's essentially a virgin of foliot kind of imagine
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: the drum part is the I think foliot, and the
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: verge is the handle and when there's like a crown wheel,
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: the gear the main gear that operates a clock. When
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: it turns, it turns the folliot, and the folliot turns
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: like slowly one way and then slowly back another and
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: when it moves back in position, the gear is allowed
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: to turn. So you're actually controlling the kinetic energy of
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: those weights that's falling and making the whole thing move,
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: and by doing that in a precise way, that's how
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: you can keep track of time.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know it stays constant because that thing
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: is constantly stopping and starting, so it's going to keep
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: that weight from picking up momentum as it goes down
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: and descends. So that's how you get the constant speed.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: And that's also how you can create a ticking sound.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: It's just that little, you know, constant intermittent movement.
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And the but you wouldn't it doesn't move like
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: an Oknawan hand drum moves. I mean, it moves not
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: as fast, I should say, be out of control clock.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Didn't that drum move faster faster the more intense
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: that the scenes got in that movie?
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: Hmm, yeah, oh yeah, Man, it really helped build the
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: suspense I think during the main fight maybe.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, this is a pretty smart device for
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: a movie.
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: It was a good sequel as far as sequels go.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: They didn't just you know, build on the last one.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: They really kind of went all out and recreating things.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And one of the great bad movies of all time.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: And I'm lobbying to get on a friend of the
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: show The Flophouse, the best bad movie podcast out there
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: in my opinion, to do Karate Kid three, which is
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: hugely entertaining as a bad movie.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: Is that even worse than Jaden Smith's Karate Kid, because
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: I heard that was pretty bad.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: I didn't see it. But Karate Kid three, oh man,
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: if you're into a fun bad movie to watch with people,
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: Karate Kid three is one. And that was one where
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: I thought I talked about on the show at some point,
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: but where God, Ruby was probably like six years old
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: and came up with, like, legit, her first quality joke
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: watching that movie.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: Can you share it?
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: Uh?
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: I don't know if it would translate. I'll tell you later.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: Okay, that's fine, Yeah, but good for her. Six is
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: a good age to come up with a quality joke by.
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: Actually, I think I could. Actually there's a recurring thing
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: in that movie that happens where every time the bad
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: guys come into a place, they turn a light off,
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: like they'll come into a warehouse to fight, and they
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: turn the light off. It happened like two or three times,
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: and I kept going like, what is going on? It's
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: so weird. And then later in the movie they they
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: rush out and find Daniel Son and Miagi in a forest,
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: and Ruby said, that'd be funny if they reached over
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: to a tree and turned the moon off.
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: That's good. That is a quality joke.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: That's a pretty good joke.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, yeah, I haven't seen the karate Kid three.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: I know of it. I know Hillary Swank's the karate
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: kid in that one.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no. Uh, well, maybe I'm getting the
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: number wrong. Karate Kid three was actually Daniel and Miagi still,
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: Oh was it? Yeah? Unless I have it out of order,
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: it's not. But I know it's not the Hillary Swank
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: one obviously. Okay, all right, yeah, so it's either three
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: or four.
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: Well, I haven't seen the one you're talking about either.
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: I don't remember anybody turning off any lights anywhere.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's truly bad in a great way.
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: Okay, So just back to Just like in the Muslim world,
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: time keeping pieces in Europe were initially to keep people
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: on track for daily prayers. Apparently, monks and monasteries prayed
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: seven times a day, but there were also meals. There
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: was also beer brewing time, and so these early clocks,
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: using the virgin folio mechanism and weights, they helped keep
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: the monks on track. Yeah, monks are associated with churches,
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: so very soon after that churches started keeping clocks as well.
• 32:51
  Speaker 2: And fun fact, one of the reasons that churches often
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: have very very tall steeples, often with bells on top,
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: is because used to be parts of the clock. To
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: run a clock so big that it can ring that bell,
• 33:05
  Speaker 2: you need to have very heavy weights there coming and
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: descending from a very high place.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, nice little factoid there.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: I love that one.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: And the oldest surviving mechanical clock is in a church.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: It was built for this Salisbury Cathedral that was in
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: thirteen eighty six. But these clocks didn't have a face yet.
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: It was still you know, like ringing a bell kind
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: of thing to know what time it was. And in fact,
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: the word clock comes from the French word is it close?
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: I guess like that glass thing dome you put over stuff.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, which is a bell. But you know, it wasn't
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: too long after that that they said, hey, if we
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: can have a clock turning gears, how hard would it
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: be to actually put a sun dial kind of like
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: thing on the front of it and turn the gears
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: of a hand so people could actually see what time
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: it was. Yeah, And they went, not that hard, we
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: can do that.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: They're like, are you talking about a moving gnomon? And
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: the monk said, that's exactly what I'm talking about that's right.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: So there's this really interesting take on all that, the
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: fact that the clocks started tracking time in monasteries and
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: then churches in the cities that were built around churches
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: would all hear the bell, so people knew what time
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: it was all of a sudden. It wasn't like the
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: sky's purple, so I better milk the cows. It was like, oh,
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: it's one in the afternoon, so I better milk the cows. Right,
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: because apparently the sky would turn purple at one in
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: the afternoon in medieval Europe. And there's a philosopher named
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: Lewis Mumford I think he was working in the nineteen thirties,
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: and he says that that is the birth of the
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: modern era, not steam power that came hundreds of years later. Right,
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: removing people from the rhythms, the natural rhythms of the
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: day and imposing time on them all of a sudden,
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: you could be like be at my blacksmith shop at
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: three or else you're fired. You know, that would a
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: draft exactly. I think that's a really good case that
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: he makes.
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, totally. I mean it was a real game changer,
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: and that's when everyone got a little bit more uptight, I imagine.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: I imagine as well.
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: You know, and we still didn't have minutes at this point,
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: like those clocks that we were talking about, you know,
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: grinding those gears around, you could still have a you know,
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: a decent hour. As far as accuracy goes. The word
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: minute actually to mean what we meant, it didn't even
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: come around until the late fourteenth century. So minutes are
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: a relatively modern thing if you consider fourteenth century modern.
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: Right, and thanks for letting me take that, Lewis mum
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: for little tidbit.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, did you like that one?
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: I love it. It's almost as good as the the
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: different smells of incense.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, we like to scratch each other's back.
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: Another joke skipped. So you can take weights and their
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: kinetic energy, and really now you can do You can
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: take anything that has kinetic energy and use it to
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: control its release, and you can use that to do
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: things like drive gears and things like that, and you
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: can use those gears to keep time with Well, a
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: coiled spring has a lot of kinetic energy. And yeah,
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: replacing the weights in clocks with coiled springs meant they
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: became portable because of course humans love to make things portable.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but they were still pretty inexact because friction is
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: a thing, So depending on how well it's made, how
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: well it was lubricated, if it was hot, if it
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: was humid, that that would make just change the way
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: clocks work. So they were still pretty inexact at this point.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: So sundials were still kind of preferred. Water clocks were
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: still preferred for a long time, and actually more precise.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: If you really want to jump forward in precision, you
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: can look no further than Galileo Galilee and the turn
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: of the seventeenth century, and he was the one that
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: kind of came up with this idea of a pendulum
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: when he started measuring the movement of lamps swinging on
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: a cord using his own pulse beat as a reference.
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: Pretty cool.
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, So he found like you can use a pendulum
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: to keep time. The reason why, as a pendulum swing
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: is divided in exactly and half time wise, right, So
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: that's what's called a harmonious oscillator. Each swing to the
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: left or the right is the exact same amount of time,
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: and even more than that, when a pendulum loses energy,
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: that doesn't change the arcs just get a little shorter,
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: but they're still equal to one another, right. So Galileo
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: figured out that you could use that information to build
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: a clock. He developed the clock. He never built it
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: because he kept being called a way by the Indigo
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: girls to help them get through life, so he was
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: unable to build it. His son started to build it,
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: but as Galileo always said, that boy never finished anything
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: that he started, so he didn't complete it. And finally,
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: in sixteen fifty six, the Dutch mathematician Christian Hugens, the
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: son Galileo always wanted, he ended up creating that clock,
• 38:24
  Speaker 2: the first pendulum clock that Galileo had kind of come
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: up with.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was in sixteen fifty six. And almost right
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: after that there was an English scientist named Robert Hook
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: with an e of the end, said you know what,
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: I could make that thing better, and he replaced the
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: verge with you know that we mentioned earlier, with a
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: something called an anchor escapement, which was just a new
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: mechanism to regulate the swing I guess, but that allowed
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: the arc of the pendulum to be reduced from about
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: one hundred I'm sorry, one hundred degree swing to four
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: to six degrees, which again meant you could pack it
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: in a packageable size.
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And also they found that less of a swing,
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: they found that the less wide the arc, the more
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: accurate the timekeeping was. Anchor escapements are almost impossible to
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: explain unless you see it actually happening, and they're like, oh, okay,
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: that totally makes sense. But I say, go look up
• 39:22
  Speaker 2: a video of how anchor escapements work, because it's pretty amazing.
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: And so because you have slower moving pendulums, they require
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: less power, which means you need less weight. And eventually
• 39:35
  Speaker 2: there's a guy named William Clement who put all of
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: this stuff together and in sixteen eighty came up with
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: what we now call grandfather clocks. And because of everything
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: that kind of developed from Galileo on, Clement was able
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: to add a minute hand and now all of a
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: sudden you knew what minute it was of the hour
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: thanks to William Clement.
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: That's right, And of course you're referring to the long
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: case clock. It didn't get the name grandfather clock until
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: eighteen twenty I'm sorry, eighteen seventy six. And that's actually
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: from a song called My Grandfather's Clock. That's where it's
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: about I mean, it's kind of a sad song about
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: a clock that this this guy had who or his
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: grandfather had, and it quit working when he died, and
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: it was a really popular song. So long case clocks
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: became my grandfather's clock, and the singer and I think
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: writer was a guy named Henry Clay, not Henry Clay people,
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: but Henry Clay work.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: You know, that's a redux of our first short stuff.
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: I thought we had talked about that, right, that was
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: the very first, the very first one.
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: Huh yeah, grandfather clocks man, so pendulum clocks. Everyone said,
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: this is great. I love these long case slash grandfather clocks.
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: But finally, in the twenties people had figured out, I
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: guess centuries before, in the nineteenth century, a century before
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: that you could keep tying with a crystal. They produced
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: reliable oscillations that you could track for time, and people
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: figured out how to use that and watches for that.
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: I would say, go listen to our atomic clock episode.
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a good one.
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: Out From crystal quartz came atomic clocks, and from atomic
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: clocks came things like GPS. It's how your iPhone or
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: you know, Google phone keeps track of the time knows
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: exactly what time it is thanks to an atomic clock.
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: So we went from sun to water to pendulums to
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: crystals to atoms.
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: That's right. And by the way, I bet I made
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: that same dumb Henry Clay joke and that short stuff didn't.
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: I I'll have to go back and listen. But anytime
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: you get a chance to mention Henry Clay People, you do,
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: and I support it fully.
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: Of course, for those of you who don't know, Henry
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: Clay People was a great band and friends of the
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: show whom are a good Joey and Andy Ciarra, the brothers,
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: musical brothers, screenwriting brothers, and they did the theme song
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: to the Stuff You Should Know TV show.
• 42:07
  Speaker 2: That's right. It was a great theme, very catchy, and.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: They're still a great friends. I see Joey all the
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: time because he lives in New York now and Andy's
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: still in LA.
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: That's awesome. Shout out.
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: That's right. So we're back or not, we're back. We're
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: all of a sudden headed toward Watches. Everyone mm hm,
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: and I mean this again, could be an entire episode
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: on Watches. So we're not going to get to in
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: the weeds, but those spring based clocks. Of course, that
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: spring was kind of the key in the fifteenth century,
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: eventually involved to wearable clocks like flava flave, and then
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: then eventually we got to watch us. By the sixteenth century,
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: of course, we were talking about pocket watches. Initially kind of
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: thing you hang from your vest or your belt or something,
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: and it was a real fashion statement at the time.
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: But as that technology progressed, they got smaller and smaller,
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: maybe not more accurate, but just smaller enough to where
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: you could finally put one on your wrist if you
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: were the Countess of Hungary in eighteen sixty.
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: Eight, yeah, or one of Emperor Wilhelm the Second German
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: naval officers in eighteen eighty, because before that watches were
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: women's jewelry, that's what they were considered. Wilhelm the Second
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: said nine, now it's going to be a military gear. Yeah.
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: And from World War One, which came a little later,
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: the American and other Allied troops who came back home
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: were like, you should see these hand clocks these guys have,
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: and those became very quickly as starting around the twenties
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: fashionable in the United States, and I think great Britain
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: and in the twenties because they became fashion all of
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: a sudden, there was a lot of attention on hand
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: clocks and they became a lot of innovations just kind
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: of started to build very quickly starting in the twenties.
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know a lot of this stuff that
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: you a lot of features that you have on a
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: watch if you're watch person, comes from military usage, like
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: the of course I can't remember any of this because
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: it's off the dome and I'm a forgetful person. But
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: you know the watches that have the little buttons on
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: each side of the winder and you can like click
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: it to start something and then click it to stop it.
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah, stop watch, No, stop.
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: Watch just like on a regular wristwatch. There's a name
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: for it. I mean I have one of them. I
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: just can't think of it right now.
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: But it's for a stopwatch function though, right.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: Well yeah, essentially, but as it pertains to the regular time.
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: But that was essentially, I think initially to keep track
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: of like when you would launch a not a missile,
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: like the kind of bomb you drop in a tube
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: and it shoots somewhere torpedo. Sure, No, Like you know
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: when you drop it in a tube and it shoots
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: up in the air. Yeah, drop a shell into a
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: tube and then like when it would make the explosion,
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: you would keep track of, like you would time that
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: out so you would know, like how far it's going
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: in calculat Oh smart, I think that's the deal. I
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: hope I'm not wrong. Someone will correct me.
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: Well, what about water resistance?
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean if you want to dive or just frolic,
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: then you're going to need a waterproof watch. And that
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: came along with the Rolex the Oyster, specifically in nineteen
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: twenty six, and then in the nineteen fifties that's when
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: stop watch functions, although that was around during the war,
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: So I'm not sure the difference between what I was
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: talking about in an actual stopwatch and my favorite feature,
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: which is luminescence. As you know, I kind of became
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: a bit of a watch guy. And I don't have
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: a ton of them, but got like seven watches and
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: one of them is a not for real watch people
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: they have like dozens and hundreds, but I have one
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: called a loom Tech and that is the most luminescent
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: that you can get, I think, And that thing is
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: so bright and cool. I just love it.
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: Does it leave like floaters on your vision after you
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: look at it?
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: No, But if it's like fully charging go into a
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: dark closet or something, it's like, it's super bright green
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: and it's awesome. I love it.
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: So you can really time out your spin the bottle?
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: Oh you know it, because I don't want to be
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: in that closet for me any longer than I have
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: to be.
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: I was raised baptism, making awkward conversation, Yeah, totally. So
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: if you are like I want to hear more about
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: watches ts, We're pretty much at the end of the episode,
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: but I would recommend going and listening to our watch
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: episode because we talked a lot about the transition from
• 46:35
  Speaker 2: mechanical watches to digital watches in that episode. If I
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: remember correctly, it's pretty interesting.
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Chronographs that's what I'm talking about with
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: the watches, by the way.
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: But what does it do.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: It's like a sub dial for the seconds and minutes
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: and hours I think, so that the top button will
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: be a start stop and the bottom is a reset.
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: So it did it function is like a stopwatch. But
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: I think they got their start with timing out shells
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: and when they exploded, if I'm not mistaken, not torpedoes, yeah,
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: I think, but again off the dome. So if I'm wrong,
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: all apologies you're saying.
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: Chronog chronograph reminded me of one little tidbit I forgot
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: to mention. Remember how we talked about planetary hours and
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: the Romans were like, this is when you worship you know,
• 47:25
  Speaker 2: Mars or whatever. Yeah, that is where the word horoscope
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: came from. Horoscope means our marker.
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: Pretty nay huh, yeah, I like that.
• 47:36
  Speaker 2: Okay, nifty, I like it too, And since Chuck said
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: he likes it, that obviously means it's time for listener mail.
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: That's right, And we read this from Bill I guess
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: you would pronounce this rooshline because he asked a question
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: about the appropriateness of our live show. And we've gotten
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: a few emails, so we thought we kind of get
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: the word out. Hey, guys, been listening for for ten
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: years since commuting from Erie to Pittsburgh for a new job,
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: you feel countless hours of boredom with education and smiles.
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: As my family and I now listen to your show
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: almost weekly, and my now almost eleven year old son
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: has grown up listening to you guys since shortly after
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: he was born.
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: Nice.
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: So we're coming to your show in Akron, Ohio, and
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: we're pretty ecstatic about that. We can't wait to come.
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: But I was hoping to respond and let me know
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: what the content is appropriate for our eleven year old
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: to come. We're loose with what he's allowed to listen to,
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: and don't try and shield him too much from the world.
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: Everything you put out is educational. For instance, the Operation
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: Mincemeat episode is one of our favorites. But there's anything
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: particularly mature, like murder stuff or like the Lizzie Bordon episode,
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: we should probably be responsible parents and Bill and others.
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: We're here to say that we're not going to reveal
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: the topic, but this one is very much kid appropriate.
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: The only thing you might hear we like to delight
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: people with a few odd curse words here and there
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: because we don't do it on this show, but it's
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: still what do you call it, PGPG PG eleven Maybe.
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, okay these days yeah, I would even say, depending
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: on the kid, maybe PG eight. We get some fairly
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: young kids at our shows, and I've never seen a
• 49:17
  Speaker 2: parent leave with the child. They usually just leap behind.
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: I think in Scotland didn't that when family leave.
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I still don't understand that. We didn't say anything
• 49:27
  Speaker 2: even remotely offensive. Yeah, and I think they just didn't
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: like the sounds of our voices or something like that.
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: I don't maybe so, but I don't think it was
• 49:36
  Speaker 2: anything we said.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: Okay, good.
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: Well.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: Content wise though, this one is super on the up
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: and up and kid appropriate. Nothing's scary at all, super pop, cultury, historical,
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: kind of interesting, but just maybe a curse word or two.
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe a blue joke here there, but hopefully over
• 49:55
  Speaker 2: any kid's head.
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what we like to do. It's confused children
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: so their parents get explain on the way.
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: How exactly right. That's great, Chuck, that was a good idea.
• 50:04
  Speaker 2: If you're like, wait, you guys are going on tour,
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: we absolutely are. I would direct you to stuff youshould
• 50:10
  Speaker 2: know dot com and click on the on tour button
• 50:13
  Speaker 2: and it will show you all the places we're going
• 50:14
  Speaker 2: to be and if you click on those, it will
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: take you to go buy tickets so you can come
• 50:19
  Speaker 2: see us. This is the first time in years and years,
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: I guess, since we've been on the road so we're
• 50:25
  Speaker 2: kind of excited about coming back. Maybe a little rusty, yeah,
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: but that also usually means that those first couple shows
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: get some high flying high jinks.
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I get ready Denver the Mile High City. How
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: appropriate's right?
• 50:37
  Speaker 2: And if you want to get in touch with us,
• 50:39
  Speaker 2: like Bill right, yeh Bill did? Thanks for that email
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: Bill and we'll see you in Akron. You can email
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: us at stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.