John Tyler was born in 1790 and served as the 10th president of the United States in the

early 1840s and last year one of his grandsons passed away. Let those dates and details sink in for a moment.

The grandson of a president born in 1790 just passed away last year. It sounds insane. It sounds made up and yet it's real.

It's a concept that writer Jason Kotke calls the Great Span when individual lives seem to span inconceivable lengths of time.

Another example would be the 1956 TV show I've got a secret that featured a guest named Samuel Seymour.

His secret? He was in Ford's theater on April 14th of 1865 and witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

And one more, because I love these kinds of stories so much. Last year a woman named Helen Viola Jackson passed away.

You've probably never heard of her, but she had an amazing distinction that should be pointed out. She was the last surviving widow of a civil war soldier.

Impossible? Not true. You see, back in 1936 she was just 17 and that's the year she married James Bowlin, a 93 year old veteran.

The civil war had ended 155 years earlier and yet here was a woman last year who could remember conversations with someone who fought in it.

Like I said, I love these kinds of stories. For someone who loves history it brings the past to life in a whole new way.

And it certainly gives us something fun to tell others at parties.

But the most fascinating aspect of stories like these are what they do to our perception of time.

They wow us because they seem to break the rules. They put the impossible on display and they expose just how brief and fleeting all our lives seem to be in the face of history.

Time might move at the same speed for all of us, but if we break the rules we risk inviting dangerous consequences.

I'm Aaron Manky and this is lore.

Time is a funny thing isn't it? We're all aware of it. It's a rule that all of us must follow and so it's no wonder that for thousands of years we've been trying to make it happen.

The oldest example of this as far as archaeologists are concerned is a bone object from the Simleaky Valley in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It's nearly 20,000 years old and it has the distinct marks on it of someone recording the passage of time.

And of course all around the world there are examples of monuments built and aligned to connect us with the solstices and sometimes even constellations.

Needless to say our love affair with time is pretty old.

The Babylonians and ancient Egyptians introduced calendars to civilization around 5,000 years ago and they were designed to make life more efficient.

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